Archive of Our Own ^beta

Riggs stepped into the bullpen, the familiar squeak of the door hinges echoing louder than usual in the silence. His eyes drifted, unbidden, to the empty desks. Calvary’s. Simon’s. Both of them gone, as if their absence had carved holes into the room itself. He felt the weight of it settle in his chest, heavy and suffocating. He forced his gaze away, deliberately ignoring the coffee machine sitting just a few feet from Simon’s desk. Even the thought of pouring himself a cup felt unbearable. 

He made straight for his office, shutting the door firmly behind him. The lock clicked into place, a pointless measure—no one else was here. No one was supposed to be here. They had all been ordered to take time off while Internal Affairs picked through the wreckage, trying to make sense of what had happened. But Riggs had lasted less than twenty-four hours at home. The walls had been too close, his thoughts too loud. Here, at least, there were case files and paperwork, something to keep his hands busy while his mind tried not to unravel. 

He sank into his chair, the leather creaking beneath him as he leaned back and tilted his head toward the ceiling. The fluorescent lights buzzed faintly overhead, the only sound besides his own breathing. He hadn’t even been there when it happened. Nobody had called him, nobody had told him anything about Simon until it was over. Calvary, murdered. Simon, the one behind it, now dead himself. The words still felt foreign, like pieces of a puzzle that didn’t fit together no matter how hard he pressed. 

Riggs shut his eyes, jaw tightening. He told himself to stop replaying it, to stop imagining what he hadn’t seen. He needed to work. That was the only thing left to do. His hand reached for the nearest folder, even as his mind screamed against the silence pressing in from all sides. 

Riggs flicked open the folder, the paper crackling faintly in the stillness of the office. His eyes scanned the first page, then froze. Finn’s file. Of course it would be that one. The mess that had started all of this. Calvary’s voice rang in his head, insistent and smug—Finn was lying, Adam didn’t exist, it was just another con to escape the death penalty. Riggs had almost believed him, right up until Calvary died, and after all of it, Adam had been standing in front of them all along, hiding in plain sight. Hiding as Simon. 

His stomach turned, and he snapped the file shut with more force than he intended, the sound sharp in the silence. He winced at the echo, dragging a hand down his face. Coming here had been a mistake. He’d thought burying himself in work would help, that maybe it would quiet his thoughts, but all it had done was rip the scab off and leave everything raw again. 

Calvary had been a dick, sure, but Riggs had never wanted him dead. And Simon… Simon had been a serial killer, yes, but before any of that came to light, Simon had been his friend. They’d shared drinks, cases, late nights. And now all of that was tainted, every memory fractured beyond repair. 

He hated being left in the dark most of all. Becky hadn’t told him—hell, nobody had. Becky was working alone because everyone thought that she was the Trapper, all thanks to Adam. Felicity hadn’t, because what she was doing would never hold up in court. But Tom… Riggs still couldn’t figure that out. Was Tom covering for his partner, too loyal to Becky even when things didn’t add up? Or had Tom simply decided Riggs wasn’t someone he could trust to make the right call, not when Simon’s name was in the mix? 

The questions spiraled, too loud, too heavy, and Riggs shoved the file aside like it had burned him. He grabbed for another, any other, fingers trembling slightly as he forced himself to focus on the words in front of him. He didn’t want to think about it. Couldn’t. Thinking would drag him down a road he wasn’t ready to walk, one where every answer ended in blood. 

It was too fresh. Too raw. And yet, sitting here in the quiet, Riggs realized he was mourning. Mourning Calvary, mourning Simon, mourning the trust that had been shattered. Mourning a friend he shouldn’t even feel allowed to grieve. 

A tear slipped down Riggs’ face before he could stop it. The warmth of it startled him, as though it didn’t belong to him at all, as though someone else’s grief had found its way into his skin. He swiped it away roughly with the back of his hand, straightening in his chair, forcing the muscles in his shoulders to lock tight. He was fine. He had to be fine. There was work to do, and no amount of breaking down would change the fact that Calvary and Simon were gone. Dead was dead. Nothing he did now could reach them. 

His eyes flicked unwillingly toward the bullpen again, toward the vacant desks that sat like ghosts waiting to be noticed. Eventually, he’d have to clean them out. The thought alone made his chest clench so hard it almost stole his breath. He could picture Calvary’s drawer, probably stuffed with case files, and Simon’s—organized, neat, every pen lined up like soldiers in a row. 

Riggs pressed a fist to his forehead, as if the pressure would hold him together. Not now. He couldn’t face it now, not with the memories still raw and jagged, not when just thinking of it made the world tilt beneath his feet. One day, maybe, when the storm in his chest wasn’t so violent. When he could think about them without feeling like everything was collapsing around him. 

For now, he forced his gaze back to the file in his hands, though the words blurred and twisted on the page. He told himself to focus. To breathe. To do something—anything—that didn’t involve remembering the way the bullpen had looked when it wasn’t empty. 

Riggs dragged in a steadying breath and forced his eyes down to the folder on his desk. The words swam before him, stubbornly refusing to fall into place, but he anchored himself with the simple act of turning a page, of letting the paper slide beneath his fingers. If he kept his hands moving, maybe his mind wouldn’t wander. 

But it did. 

The silence of the bullpen wasn’t the usual kind—the low murmur of voices, Calvary’s arrogant laugh cutting too loud across the room, Simon’s steady presence behind his desk, all of it was gone. In its place was a hollow stillness, and Riggs couldn’t unhear the echo of their absence. Every time he blinked, he saw them. Calvary, leaning back in his chair with that smug grin, needling him about some detail in a report. Simon, precise and calm, offering quiet insights when the conversation died down. 

He clenched his jaw, trying to shove the images aside. They weren’t here anymore. They never would be. 

His pen hovered above the page, unmoving. He told himself to write something—anything—but the ink refused to flow. Instead his mind filled with questions he didn’t want: what Simon had been thinking all those years, how close they’d all come to Adam without seeing it, whether Calvary had realized the truth in those final moments. 

Riggs shut the folder again, more gently this time, as though afraid the noise might draw the ghosts closer. He pressed his palms against his thighs, grounding himself, counting the breaths in and out. He had to hold it together. Someone had to. The department was fractured enough without him unraveling, too. 

Still, the memories clung like smoke, seeping into every corner of his thoughts. No matter how many times he told himself to focus, the past wouldn’t stay buried. It hovered at the edge of his vision, taunting him with what he’d lost—and what he should have seen coming. 

Riggs’ gaze drifted upward despite himself, through the glass pane of his office door. His eyes caught on Simon’s desk, neat and orderly as if its owner might walk back in at any moment and start sorting files again. The sight hit him like a punch to the chest. His lungs seized, and for a heartbeat it felt like he couldn’t breathe at all. 

He sucked in a sharp breath, trying to steady himself, but it only made the pressure inside him break loose. The control he’d been clinging to crumbled, and suddenly the tears were spilling hot and unchecked down his face. He bent forward, gasping between sobs that tore from his throat, raw and unrestrained. His chest heaved, every breath fractured, every attempt to stop only feeding the storm. 

They were dead. Both of them. Calvary and Simon. Dead, and he hadn’t done a damn thing to prevent it. And now there was nothing he could do. Nothing at all. He was their sergeant—he should have been the one holding them together, should have been the one they could trust. Instead, they hadn’t told him anything. They’d shut him out. Adam had been right there, right under their noses, and Riggs had laughed with him, joked with him, treated him like one of his own. 

The betrayal twisted with grief until it was unbearable. Calvary might’ve been an insufferable bastard, but he’d been a good cop, one of the best when it mattered. And Simon… Riggs wanted to hate him, wanted to erase every good memory, but the truth was Simon had been his friend before the mask slipped. He’d trusted him. And that made the knife cut deeper. 

The guilt poured through him, thick and relentless, tangling with grief and anger and confusion until it hollowed him out. He pressed his hands over his face, shoulders shaking as sobs wracked through him, powerless to stop it. The weight of it all—what he’d lost, what he’d failed to see—crashed over him like a tide he couldn’t fight. And for the first time since walking into the bullpen, he stopped trying to hold himself together. 

Riggs stayed hunched over, hands digging into his face as the sobs ripped through him. He couldn’t stop them, couldn’t even slow them down. Every time he tried to catch his breath, another wave hit him harder than the last, dragging him under. His whole body trembled, shaking with the force of it, until he finally stopped fighting. 

He let it all come. 

All the anger. All the grief. All the guilt that had been rotting in his chest since the news had broken. He let it pour out of him in broken gasps and strangled cries, his voice cracking in the hollow silence of the office. His tears smeared across his palms, dampening his sleeves as he clawed for air that never seemed to fill his lungs enough. 

He wanted it out—all of it. If he bled the grief dry now, maybe it wouldn’t catch him off guard later. Maybe he wouldn’t break apart again when someone else was watching. He told himself he had to get it out, every last drop, because holding it in was worse. It was suffocating him, eating him alive from the inside. 

Images blurred together behind his eyes—Calvary’s smirk, Simon’s steady voice, the bullpen filled with noise instead of silence. The weight of betrayal mixed with the ache of loss until there was no separating one from the other. He gasped, sobbing harder, his body folding in on itself like he could make himself smaller, could hide from the storm tearing through him. 

There was no hiding. There was no holding it back anymore. So he gave in. He let the memories and the guilt and the pain tear their way free, spilling out of him in raw, jagged pieces, because it was the only way he knew to survive it. 

It took a long time for Riggs to quiet down again. His body ached from the shaking, his throat raw from the sobs, his eyes burning with the sting of tears. The storm didn’t leave quickly—it clawed and lingered, dragging him through every memory, every thought he’d tried to bury. But eventually, the sobs ebbed, leaving only shallow breaths and the thud of his pulse in his ears. 

He sat back slowly, scrubbing his hands over his face, dragging in one deep breath, then another. The hollow ache was still there, but the pressure that had been choking him all day had eased, just enough to make him feel like he wasn’t about to shatter at the slightest touch. For the first time since stepping into the bullpen, he didn’t feel like the air would crush him. 

He was still angry. Still guilty. Still reeling from the betrayal that cut deeper the more he thought about it. But now he could breathe through it. The knot inside him had loosened, if only slightly, and it made the grief bearable in a way it hadn’t been before. Less tightly strung. Less brittle. Like maybe he could stand up from this chair without collapsing under the weight of it all. 

Riggs leaned back, staring up at the ceiling once more. He wasn’t fine—not even close—but at least he wasn’t holding himself together by threads anymore. If someone walked in now, if someone spoke to him, he wouldn’t crumble to pieces at the sound of their voice. That was something. Small, fragile, but something. 

He dragged a hand over his mouth, the silence pressing heavy again now that the storm inside him had passed. His thoughts drifted, unbidden, back to Simon. He wished—God, he wished—that Simon hadn’t killed himself. That he’d let himself be caught. If only Riggs had been given one last chance to sit across from him, to look him in the eye and ask him why. Why he’d done it. Why he’d lied to them all. Why he’d let Riggs trust him, laugh with him, call him a friend. 

Even a few answers would have been something to cling to in this wreckage. A thread of reason in a mess that felt like chaos. 

But then, as quickly as the longing came, another thought followed, darker and more uncertain. Maybe that would’ve been worse. Maybe facing Simon across an interrogation table would have broken him in a way he couldn’t come back from. To sit opposite the man he’d trusted, to hear his voice and see his face, knowing what was underneath—it might have been unbearable. 

Maybe it was better this way. Simon had chosen his ending. His own way out, swift and final, before the justice system could cage him and grind him down until there was nothing left but a shell waiting for the chair. 

Riggs scrubbed a hand down his face, his chest tightening with the contradiction. He hated that he wanted both—that he ached for answers but also knew they might have destroyed him if he’d ever been given the chance to hear them. 

It was done now. Nothing Riggs did could turn back the clock, couldn’t undo the choices Simon had made or bring Calvary back. The mess was his to live with, whether he wanted to or not. He would have to face it eventually—clean out their desks, hire new blood, find a way to stitch the department back together again. He told himself he’d give it a couple of days. Then he’d roll up his sleeves and do what needed doing, piece by piece, until some version of normal crept back in. 

He doubted it would be as simple as that. Nothing ever was. But thinking about it that way—like it was a job he could tackle with steady hands—was oddly comforting. A plan, even a flimsy one, gave him something to hold on to. 

For now, though, he didn’t want to think about desks or replacements or the hollow space left behind. He just wanted to go home. To sink down onto his couch, let his dog curl up beside him, and forget for a while. Maybe he’d break down again—maybe the weight of it all would crash back over him—but after tonight, after letting it tear through him once, the idea of breaking didn’t seem so unbearable. 

Riggs exhaled slowly, his shoulders sagging. Tomorrow could wait. Tonight, he just needed to be a man sitting with his grief, not a sergeant trying to fix the unfixable.