This is a WIP I've been posting on AO3 since January and I've been umming and aahing about posting it here too and tonight I decided to in the hopes it'll stop me procrastinating on the next chapter (I'm writing ch15 currently) I took the opportunity to make a few little edits too but nothing significant so far.

I'll update a few chapters at a time here and you can always read it over on AO3 if you'd prefer to.

"Cross your heart and hope to die?"

The kid in front of Jay says it in a sing-song voice which almost minimizes the not so kind intent behind the question. The kids behind the boy all have their arms folded, little kids attempting to look tough, and to 9-year-old Jay, they succeed.

Not that they needed to try too hard, Jay would always be truthful. He may be only 9 but he's always known that being truthful is something he wants to be. To be like his mom rather than his dad.

To do what's right, even if that means being laughed at, even if that means the cold shoulder in school when school sometimes feels like a sanctuary from what happens at home.

Even if it's at great personal cost to Jay, so he nods at the boy in front of him. Wouldn't ever be any other way.

Even as they laugh at him, even as the kid pushes him backward, and even though he's prepared for it, he falls back onto the ground, anyway.

Even with the days that follow that feel like months before the same kid taps him on the shoulder one day in class and invites him to join in and it's forgotten.

Till next time, till the next time, he faces doing what's right versus doing what the easiest choice would be.

Over and over again throughout his life, a pattern repeated, some kind of foolish mission to prove to who even knows who that he wasn't Pat Halstead and never would be.

Thing is, he wasn't even sure till now that it was foolish. Though a voice in his head kept feeding his doubts, a voice that sounded so much like his mom, 'Do what's right for you baby, stop doing what you think is the right thing even if it hurts you'.

Warmth, love, concern, always concern and yet each time just like that night when 9-year-old Jay had gone home, his face lined with a streak of tears he'd not wiped away properly and shook his head at his mother's questions, told her he was okay and quietly disappeared upstairs before his dad came home and before there was even a tiny fraction of a chance Will would be concerned enough to ask, he batted it away. Told himself truth always came before everything.

Here and now, he supposes, there's at least an excuse for even considering what he's about to tell the woman across the room from him.

He's in pain, he's likely concussed, everything in his head between both ears is a constant ringing noise, accompanied by a throbbing pain and there's this pit of dread in his stomach that tells him the misplaced confidence he had earlier was all for nothing.

He can't open one eye now either, he can speak though, and the words are tumbling from his mouth before he can stop them, not that he even attempts to.

The truth, everything's that eaten at him since Marcus West died, since software they had no right to trust killed Marcus West, since he whether or not he did it himself killed Marcus West.

He can hear Voight's curse, his protestations for all the good they ever were, he can picture Hailey as if she was in front of him now, her fingertips pressing against Jay's lips urging him to take back every single word.

It's too late, though. How did he ever think it'd end any differently, anyway?

He hears every word Angela says, hears 'You deserve to die' and perhaps he's tired, perhaps he's more injured than he thought, perhaps he understands exactly what she means because it's not like a kick to the stomach when she says it.

Pat Halstead once told him that being honest wasn't the best policy always, except he'd died with Jay believing he hadn't attended his academy graduation.

So who even knows what's right or wrong and who is Jay to be the moral arbiter, anyway? What right did he have to be the one with the truth and using it to force his way into Angela and Bobby's lives when he was at least one of those who'd been party to the end of Marcus's.

That voice in his head murmurs 'Oh Jay, stop doing this to yourself', he's too busy focusing on the fact that Angela doesn't tell the bad guy who Jay is so that's yet another piece of evidence to chalk up in favor of never being honest again.

She doesn't kill him or say another word to him even though all the words and wounds in her head, all the pain both physical and mental must feel like it belongs nowhere other than on Jay's body or in his soul right now.

She lets him run up the stairs and in Jay's head, he's making all kinds of promises, even while he attacks the other bad guy, even when Hailey arrives and he's dimly aware of her words and for a moment he considers responding that he's okay, would expect her to doubt him and maybe in his head, he'd say 'Cross my heart' but only that because too late he's realized that being truthful isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Truth is, he knew that long ago anyway, truth is he's been skating on the edge between truth and lies since what seems like forever.

Truth is all that he can hear in his head over and over right now is 'You deserve to die' except there she is again, the voice of doubt that sounds like his mom, that's joined by more familiar voices because he's almost forgotten completely what his mom sounds like if it weren't for doubt.

He says nothing to Hailey though except to say he's going back downstairs and then he's running back downstairs hoping that he doesn't have another death on his conscience, hoping that Bobby won't grow to hate him even more than he will do when he finds out the truth, anyway.

The gun, and oh shit the gun he'd forgotten all about, is in her hand raised high enough to harm and he thinks it will be okay as he tells her it's over, thinks she'll never forgive him and that the lie he briefly allows himself that is that that's okay because he won't either and maybe this is his time to leave anyway cause everything around him always turns to crap, eventually.

Then she raises the gun once more, and it's not like the last time it happened, he knows it's bad, real bad because it's immediate, the struggle for breath, the pain that's crushing, the light above him that's fading in and out and the warring voices.

Angela's, his mom.

'You deserve to die'

'You don't Jay, you don't, cross my heart, please don't die'

Over and over.

And then just as he feels consciousness leave him and he tries hard to fight against it, there's a sudden pressure on his chest that makes his eyes fly open and he hears a familiar voice begging him to stay awake and to stay with them, he can't even lie one last time, can't even muster up half a smile and say 'it's okay' and hope it's the one truth he could be content to speak.

Instead, he says words he's said too many times in his life already.

'I'm sorry'.

And that's when the lights go out.