Redemption (boyxboy) (18+)

Chapter Thirty-five

Stage Three: Bargaining

Nate wakes up one morning and, for no particular reason, goes to the library.

He wanders through the stacks, breathes in the musty smell of old paper and ink, lets his fingers trail over the book spines. He nods at the pleasant-faced librarian; he thumbs through a copy of Doctor Zhivago.

And he finally chooses the morning's issue of the Salt Lake Tribune and settles in at a huge oak table. But he barely has time to skim the first article before two patrons gather their things and quickly move away from him; Nathaniel frowns down at his filthy coat and stained jeans, realizing for the first time that he hasn't washed his one set of clothing since he left Reid.

But still, he stays. He reads.

And when he gets to the obituaries, he freezes. He doesn't know why at first - it's just unfamiliar names and ages and causes of death, funeral details and next of kin. Whole lives wrapped up in tiny blurbs, a few words that don't actually explain anything that really matters.

He reads them all, wondering how many of these he has been responsible for over the years. He tries to remember them all; now including Eve and Devon and Elsa and the motel clerk in DC.

He'd never even bothered to learn the guy's name.

And that's how, hours later, he finds himself consumed with research. He's buried behind piles of newspapers, combing through Facebook pages that have turned into tributes to the dead. He writes down every detail he can find, concentrating on the names of the people who have been left behind. The ones who were living without their loved ones, because Nate knows that pain intimately now.

It makes him sick to know that he was ever the cause of it for anyone.

By the time he's finished, he has a carefully itemized list of thirty-seven people that he is absolutely sure he has stripped of their family or significant other. Thirty-seven more lives to feel guilty about.

He has no idea why he has bothered with all of this, but it feels important. It feels like a key, like there's something he desperately needs to see if he just looks hard enough.

So he sits in the library and he stares at his cramped handwriting. And he thinks.

The sun sets; people come and go.

Nothing.

It finally comes to him like most great ideas - at the moment when he stops trying to figure it out. He's standing at a urinal, staring idly at the library bathroom's tile wall when he thinks, this is about the money.

He blinks, zips up, and strides back to his table and list, buzzing with purpose. Because Nate may have confessed most things in his deposition, but he still has his secrets. Ones even Reid doesn't know about, ones some part of Nathaniel fought to keep buried - just in case he needed them some day.

That's what all his secret stashes were always about, anyway.

He'd created his first one when he was sixteen and still a decade from even considering rebelling against his family. Still, he'd felt the need to have an escape hatch, just in case. So he'd pried up a floorboard in his high school music room and stashed two hundred dollars and a switchblade inside.

His just-in-case stashes have grown more sophisticated over the years - from buried bags in remote corners of the desert to safety deposit boxes under fake names and finally to a few offshore bank accounts - but he never knew what he was going to do with any of them.

Staring down at the list of people he has devastated, he thinks he finally understands.

He's going to use it to redeem himself.