Ryo still isn't sure what he wants, or what Dee wants, or what either of them think they're doing or are actually doing or, occasionally, what day it is. But for the moment, while Dee is still recuperating from a bullet wound in his leg and Ryo still gets the shakes so badly that he has to sit down every time he thinks of the sound of that school building exploding, all bets are off. He'll go back to being conflicted later. Right now he wants to grab hold of Dee and hang on as tight as he can until Dee has promised never, ever to almost get killed again, and God help JJ if he barges in on them this time.
This isn't something he's proud of. He's embarrassed that he flung himself onto a man with a gunshot wound and sobbed into his neck instead of getting him outside and into an ambulance. He's pissed off and ashamed that if it hadn't been for Bikky JJ would have goaded him into throwing down over which of them Dee was more important to in front of the entire bomb squad. He feels awful for inadvertently being kind of an asshole to a guy who had just taken a bullet for his foster son. And he finds himself dwelling on all of those things because anything, anything is better than really sitting down and thinking about what he felt during those few minutes that he thought Dee was dead, and what it should mean for them from here on out.
But all that is for later. Right now Ryo's going to make sure that JJ doesn't get a chance to hand-feed Dee his hospital food; and when Dee makes a crack about Ryo not cheating on him while he's laid up, Ryo answers the way he would if Dee were serious.
2. Wheedled the Chief into giving him and Dee the small office in the new station house, the one that only fits two people.
It's not like a closed office door is going to deter JJ. If threats, occasional violence, and four thousand miles of ocean aren't enough to deter JJ, the door of a bank vault would probably only temporarily slow him down. It's more of a psychological thing. Besides, it's less distracting for Ryo to have his own space, and it's convenient to have his partner in there with him.
He decides it's better not to ask where Bikky learned the term "nesting."
3. Recruited Diana to the cause.
Ryo is crazy about Diana Spacey, in a completely platonic and utterly cowed way; but there aren't many people he'd wish her off on when she's on the warpath, and most of them are safely dead or in jail. So he actually feels a little bad about it, and he didn't really mean to – but Diana notices everything, and Ryo doesn't always catch himself before he actually starts grinding his teeth, and it's pure bad luck that JJ is feeling particularly amorous during her visit to the precinct. So when JJ bursts into the office and flings himself at Dee, there's a blur and a loud crash and the next thing Ryo knows JJ is pinned to the floor by a wickedly long stiletto heel to the sternum.
Diana lifts her sunglasses and looks down at him, calmly cracking her gum. "Sorry about that, JJ," she says insincerely.
JJ gives a sort of panicked wheeze.
"Ya know, though," she continues. "Maybe the middle of a police station isn't the place to be making a whole lot of sudden moves. People tend to have very finely honed fight or flight reflexes. I'd hate to have to come visit you in the morgue because you caught Ryo there on a bad day and he plugged you between the eyes before he realized what he was doing."
"Er," Ryo protests weakly.
"If I let you up, are you gonna be good?"
JJ nods emphatically.
"Good boy," Diana says, removing her heel from JJ's chest.
True to his word, JJ refrains from tackling Dee for the rest of Diana's visit. Ryo finds himself wishing that she could be assigned there permanently.
4. Locked the damn door.
Not that it'll make much difference, not if JJ actually snapped the lock on the bedroom door in Ryo's apartment (though Ryo's fair enough to admit that he had good cause that time). And he doesn't lock the door all the time. It was just that once, really, when they had a long and very bad day and Dee looked like he wanted nothing more than to smoke about twenty cigarettes and fall asleep over the paperwork.
That was a nice night, come to think of it – the precinct uncharacteristically quiet, dark outside the windows and pools of lamplight inside, Dee with his head pillowed on a stack of arrest warrants and his breathing slow and even, strands of hair falling unnoticed over his eyes. So all things considered Ryo supposes it was just as well that JJ kicked the door in before the urge to brush Dee's hair aside and trace a line of soft kisses up the back of his neck became too strong to ignore.
5. Didn't lock the damn door.
Never let it be said that Ryo Maclean isn't a fast learner. Well, all right, occasionally some things take a pretty unreasonably long time to get across; but usually they don't, and Ryo has learned two things recently. First, that Dee is more insecure about relationships, Ryo, and the world in general than he lets on; and second, that right after the first time you've slept with someone is a bad time to get so caught up in a nasty set of cases that neither of you has time for anything but work.
So he does things, small things – brushing his fingers over Dee's when he hands over the car keys, fleeting closeness when they both need something out of the filing cabinet at the same time, discreet pushes out the door that take his hand just a little lower on Dee's back than is really appropriate for partners – and finds himself hoping, embarrassingly enough, that JJ will notice and catch on. Because the alternative is to sit JJ down and say Look, man, keep your tongue out of my boyfriend's ear or there's going to be trouble, and just the thought makes Ryo sort of want to die.
In short, all those things add up to the office door not getting locked much anymore, even when Dee has pushed Ryo up onto his desk and nearly back over his desk and is groping him slowly and teasingly but very effectively. Ryo hasn't completely lost his mind, Dee or no, so sometimes he'll smack Dee back and make him wait until later; but just as often he finds himself wrapping his legs around Dee's hips and whispering things into his mouth that make Ryo a little appalled at himself when he remembers them afterward, while the perpetual raucous clamor of the station rattles around outside and people carry on conversations right on the other side of the door.
It's just Ryo's luck that those are about the only times that JJ doesn't burst in on them, as if he is, perversely enough, the one person in the precinct who has an infallible "Dee and Ryo are about to have sex on the desk" radar that keeps him away instead of pulling him inexorably in with coffee or gossip or new case files. Maybe it's just as well, though. Dee's still doing the end-zone dance over the time that Rose walked in on them right when Ryo's hand was sliding down Dee's pants, which is sort of undignified and Ryo really doesn't want to be tempted to do the same thing.
But he's human enough that he won't lose a whole lot of sleep if it happens.
6. And one thing he didn't do, sorely though he was tempted.
Ryo's a nice guy. He is. But he's got limits, and he found out where they were quite unexpectedly the first time JJ threw himself onto Dee on the shooting range and planted one right on Dee's mouth with the sloppy ebullience of a sailor on shore leave from World War II. Ever since then, Ryo's reminded himself at least once a week that the drawback of being a sharpshooter is that no one will actually believe that his gun went off by accident and winged JJ in the balls.
Anyway, if anyone's noticed that Ryo's gun always seems to need polishing when JJ is draped across Dee's lap nuzzling him in a way entirely inappropriate to the workplace, no one's said anything yet.
