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The visions and subsequent prevention of three separate murders in ten days, combined with the corresponding effort to stay well under the radar of Lara's increasingly suspicious colleagues, had taken a toll on all of them. Above all else, they had taken a toll on Dash.
It wasn't bad enough to stop him from joining Wally in taking Lara up on her offer of celebratory drinks at her place. But after a few hours of friendly socializing and the better part of a bottle of bourbon between the three of them - especially now that Wally had left them on slightly unsteady legs, boldly claiming to have some 'important other appointment' after two o'clock in the morning ('Rule seventeen!' Dash had gleefully shouted and then - to Wally's and her mutual mortification - 'Get some!', which - no. She really needs to fabricate an excuse to come by his place, find that damn book and destroy it), the precog looks decidedly worse for wear.
His stolid insistence that he is fine does nothing to hide either the pronounced bags under his eyes, nor the distinctly pained way he blinks into the light of the sole lamp they had left on in the corner.
Getting up and turning her back on him to fix them another drink presents her with the perfect opportunity for an ambush. Bottle in hand, she whips around halfway into an anecdote about Rico's latest shenanigans and duly catches him one-handedly massaging his temples, eyes half-lidded and working his jaw as if trying to rid himself of a toothache.
The fact that her sudden movement not only almost startles him into cardiac arrest, but also leaves her spilling a fair amount of whiskey on the floor gets chalked up as necessary collateral damage.
"Ha!" she crows her triumph, almost perversely pleased that he hadn't seen it coming and imperously points her bottle at his bewildered face. "I got you, mister! You are in pain - don't try to deny it! You haven't been hooked to Wally's machine in three days and you aren't that drunk either, so fess up, or I swear I'll tranq you and cart your lily-white ass to the hospital."
Dash visibly deflates and looks, if anything, more resigned than intimidated by her challenge. Abandoning any further attempts to hide his discomfort, he instead pitches his entire upper body forward until his head is almost level with his knees. Lara catches herself looking on in the special type of rapt fascination that comes with moderate inebriation, while he spends a considerable amount of time pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes, raking his fingers through his hair and slowly righting himself, before he shoots her a weary look and all but collapses back into his corner of the couch.
"Wally calls it a migraine, but as far as MedNet is concerned it is just exhaustion induced headaches."
Lara is intensely relieved that it isn't anything more serious - he's not that good of a liar to deceive her even this early into their partnership. Exhaustion is something that is easy to fix. She turns around again to get rid of the bottle - no use to keep drinking when they are about to break up their little party anyway - and gives him a bit more time to compose himself.
"Well, in that case you best just crash here - no use in dragging yourself halfway across town to your shoebox apartment just in time to listen to all your neighbors get up."
"What? Oh, no, please - that's not necessary. I'll just be on my way! Don't want to impose on you any more than I already have. You've got to be tired yourself. Thanks though, for the drinks. And, uh, you know - all your help this week."
Lara is neither alert nor sober enough to immediately understand what had made him shut down and lapse into this sudden bout of seemingly unprovoked anxious discomfort. He had made such great progress in that area over the last couple of weeks! She decides that she has no patience to indulge his crazy tonight.
"There won't be a problem since you will take the couch so I'd still have my bedroom" she tells him flatly.
"and besides, I got more than enough paperwork that needs doing to keep me awake for at least a few hours. And before you even get started: none of that 'I don't need rest, I slept for a decade'-bullshit tonight, Dash. You just admitted that you are fried!"
While he still stares at her with an almost childlike petulance, the fact that he didn't just stubbornly continue to argue was concession enough for her. Magnanimous in her victory, she continues in a much more conciliatory tone.
"Oh, and also: pretty much any couch is about as comfortable as your sorry excuse for a bed, you said that yourself. So tell me. What's the real problem here?"
"I don't like... Well, I try not to..."
Dash's eyes restlessly dart across the room, his entire body a sudden unhappy coil of nervous energy. Not for the first time, Lara thinks that for a guy who regularly struggles to form coherent sentences regarding human emotions, his body language hides absolutely nothing to the observer.
After visibly abandoning at least half a dozen more sentences before even opening his mouth, he huffs a sigh that sounds distinctly more annoyed with himself than with her. Lara sits very still while he arranges his thoughts.
"I wouldn't get any real rest anyway. I get these... Nightmares. Sort of."
He nods to himself, finally settling his gaze on her again and takes a visible breath, as if bracing himself for what he's about to tell her. The words that follow come rushed but clear and certain, drawing her in almost like a rip current.
"For about a week after I get a new vision, I keep seeing it again when I sleep. Even the ones we prevented. It's like my brain can't get rid of the images. Or gets rid of the images in that way. If that makes sense. But I get more than just the vision itself - I'm stuck in some scene, some sort of context for the murder - like a HoloShow, you know? It's not like I actually see what happens - or was supposed to happen - anyway. At least I'm pretty sure it's not exactly how the murders play out in reality. But I'm still right there, in the middle of a live-action rendition of them. Sometimes it's one vision over and over, sometimes it's elements from lots of old visions combined. Either way, I can't interact - nobody can see or hear me, and I can't touch anything.
So in a way", he summarizes in a very small voice, "it's almost worse. Than getting just the flashes of an actual vision, I mean."
"God, Dash - that's horrible!" The moment she says the words, Lara realizes that it's that kind of reply to a confession like his which earned her the unofficial title of Queen of Understatement at the precinct. Though she is also pretty damn sure that even someone who was as erudite as her mom's beloved Maya Angelou wouldn't know what to say to a man who routinely lives through that kind of torture, even if they'd gotten as used to Dash spastically twitching through his visions as Lara has at this point.
He shrugs and casts his eyes down. "During the the first weeks on the island, Agatha used to sit with me at night. She'd wake me before things got really bad. She'd hold my hand for a while... not like you're thinking -" he hurries to explain, most likely misreading her fond smile at his testament to their fraternal affection as pity.
"you remember what happened when I shook the hand of van Eyck's wife?" she nods.
"That works with emotions too, at least to some degree. Like - being physically close to people who are really calm helps me calm down as well. Anyway, keeping Agatha awake all the time was no long term solution, so in the end, Arthur started bunking with me. He basically just threw his pillow at me when I made enough noise to wake him."
His eyebrows twitch in minute amusement, no doubt in reaction to her wholly scandalized expression at that last piece of information. Lara is happy she pulled it off so well - If she has learned one thing about her oddball of a partner, it is that the novelty of for once being the better-liked twin seems to serve as an endless source of amusement and smug satisfaction for Dash.
"Whatever works, right?" He concludes, the amusement gone again from his eyes in a blink. "And it's not like he doesn't care - he does. In his own way. Anyway, it's fine. I'll get by with catnaps and coffee for a week and by then it will be alright. I've got this worked out by now."
He makes a brave effort to quirk a smile her way that makes it nowhere near his eyes and nods his goodbyes. Then he pushes to his feet, briefly cracks his neck and shuffles for the door, shoulders slumped in defeat. Lara will be damned if she lets him leave to wrestle with this alone.
"That's Bullshit. Sit back down!" She lunges for his arm and snags him by the cuff of his sleeve before he can get out of reach. Dash doesn't even startle. He only seems surprised for a moment, until his look of confusion slowly morphs into the mask of mulish tenacity he habitually displays whenever he insists on disagreeing with her. Lara manhandles him back onto the couch before he has time to literally digs his heels in.
"Now come here" she orders, slipping into Official Police Voice, while pulling his shoulders around and backwards until his back hits the couch and his head rests in her lap.
"What are you doing?!"
His voice sounds half an octave higher than usual and vaguely alarmed. The stubborn mask is gone and in its place is that familiar wide-eyed, bewildered look that is his trademark expression in any situation that involves unexpected or extended physical contact. She wouldn't disclose this information under torture, but she absolutely adores that look. In her weaker moments, she is seriously tempted to smack a kiss on him just to see if his brain would actually short-circuit. Judging from the alarming shade of magenta his ears have turned in the space of a few seconds, just leaning down towards him might already do the trick tonight. She'll have to settle for rolling her eyes in a credible display of long-suffering parental exasperation.
"As I said: Paperwork. I have a mountain of it that still needs finishing, it's quiet work I can do on my TouchPalm, and it's boring enough for me that you might actually slip straight into hibernation if we're not careful. That's a risk you've got to deal with though, because I'm sure as hell not going to start throwing things at you from across the room. Now: Shoes off, legs up, close your eyes and then I don't want to hear another word from you for at least three hours. That's an order."
She didn't even have to fabricate this as an excuse. Like any cop worthy of their badge, there was little about her job that she hated more than paperwork. Try as she might, she was pathologically unable to invest more than a couple of minutes at a time into doing it, before some superhuman force compelled her to physically leave the room to do anything else. At this point in her career, Lara had all but given up on getting it done on the spot and usually let it pile up for weeks until the backlog brought the wrath of Higher down on her. With no other option, she would pick up a bottle of wine and head down to Akeela's lair after hours, working and drinking in companionable silence while her friend hacked herself into the security systems of God knows what kind of places, just to, as she liked to remind Lara with a wink and a smile 'keep her skills sharp'.
Being literally pinned in place by having the precog rest his head in her lap might just be the next best option. Besides - she had gathered a lot of experience by doing the exact same thing when babysitting an upset Rico more often than she cared to admit, both at her apartment and next door.
So having a fully grown man half-sprawled across her lap shouldn't really be all that different. And unlike Blake, who would doubtlessly have used such a moment as a pretext for getting into her pants, Dash's cluelessly naive temperament was the best precondition to keep things PG between them.
Blessedly oblivious to that last detour in her train of thought, Dash seems to have mostly relented. After they both squirm for a few seconds - Lara to maneuver her TouchPalm from her pocket onto one armrest, Dash to get out of his shoes and as comfortable as he can with his feet propped on the other - he heaves a quiet sigh and tilts his head a little to catch her eye. Lara acknowledges his concession of deafeat by removing the hand that had kept him pinned to the couch from his shoulder and giving him one of her rare, fond smiles. He'd earned this one.
"You don't have to do this for me, you know." He tells her plaintively and so brutally earnest that it hits her low in the gut like a punch.
"I know, Dash. I want to." She replies, mustering every ounce of solemn sincerety that she has left in her after a decade of police work. Before either of them has the opportunity to turn their little moment into something awkward, she pointedly focuses back to the TouchPalm in her hand.
"Now close your eyes and hush."
Predictably, it takes not even a minute for Lara to startle herself out of her task again: A passing glance at her own fuzzy slippers sends her eyes drifting towards his sock-clad feet and the light shirt he is wearing in belated consternation.
"You, uh, need a blanket?"
Dash somehow manages to lie perfectly still and keep both, his mouth and eyes resolutely shut while raising his brows until they almost touch his hairline. She can't believe that is what she gets for her generous display of compassion.
"Hey! Don't get bratty with me, mister!" She demands in a tone that's wholly unconvincing, her mind preoccupied with figuring out whether she's amused or annoyed by his middle-school antics.
Not for the first time, she can't help but be glad that she didn't run into him when they were both still teenagers. Remembering the person she was back then, she sure as hell wouldn't have spared this awkward White Boy and his weird sense of humor a second glance.
Thankfully - for both of them - Dash seems to be a lot more tired than playful tonight. His face smoothes out almost immediately and she feels more that she sees him shake his head no.
Lara leans back into the cushions, brings the TouchPalm up again and finally opens the first report. A glance at the clock tells her it's 02:29 - with a bit of luck, she'll have her backlog dealt with and her partner rested before the sun comes up.
It is not even a quarter of an hour later when she feels him twitch. Looking down, she watches a deep frown etch itself into his face. With one of her hands awkwardly hovering inches above his arm, Lara spends the better part of five minutes staring at the sleeping precog, ready to intervene, while absolutely nothing happens. Yeah, no. She won't have anything to show for the night besides neck spasms if she keeps this up.
As slowly and lightly as she knows how - she's well aware of how unexpected physical contact still startles him to hell and back - Lara brings her hand down on his shoulder and slides it across his chest until it rests over his heart. Monitoring his heartbeat should be the best way to get an early indication when something is going seriously wrong for Dash in dreamland that doesn't require her to constantly stare at his face.
The precog seems fine with the idea - his jaw relaxes minutely and most of the frown disappears. The rush of affection she feels when he reflexively brings up his own hand to cover hers is somewhat unexpected, but not entirely unwelcome.
"Go dream something nice", she whispers. Not so much a command directed at him as a plea to whatever higher power might be listening. To grant this man a little respite from his gift, which, Lara realizes - despite their mutual effort to use it for doing some good in the world - must truly be more of a curse than a blessing. Even at the best of times.
His face betrays no conscious acknowledgement of her words. Under her palm, his heart beats strong and steady.
Lara turns her attention back to the documents on her TouchPalm, wondering if filling them out by VoiceAssist would work at a whisper. Negotiating through the intricate system of blanks and input boxes was going to take forever that way, but it doesn't look like she'll be getting her other hand back any time soon.
Needless to say - Lara barely got any paperwork done that night.
When a gentle squeeze to her shoulder roused her enough to feel her TouchPalm taken out her hand and replaced by a warm mug, Lara opened her eyes to the bright light of an early morning streaming through her windows. It took a fair amount of confused blinking before the tall shadow that blocked her from the worst of the glare resolved itself into Dash. Looking about a decade younger than he had only hours before, he was beaming down at her with a grin so disarmingly fond and carefree, it wasn't until she consciously registered the strong smell of coffee that she was certain she wasn't still dreaming.
Much later, Lara realized that it was in that precise moment when she decided that working with someone - even taking one for the team - actually could get you more than it cost you, in the end.