The Hardest Word

by Sarah

It was as he was changing that Kelly saw it.

It had been a long tennis match in the heat, so long that Scotty had declared himself as much in need of a shower as the one who had actually been playing. Kel's opponent had gone off to shower in his luxurious private suite, which left the locker room for the two of them.

And as he sat on the bench, finishing up on getting dressed, his partner emerged, toweling off and pulling on his underpants, and he saw it: a puckered, ugly scar high up on Scotty's right thigh.

"...and I was thinking we could get something to..." Scotty trailed off as he caught Kelly's eye. "What's up, Jack?"

His mouth had gone dry: all he could see, all he could think of, was the evidence, etched in living flesh, of the price Scotty had paid for his failure. Of the time, with misplaced trust, he had gotten him shot. He had put that scar on him, and his partner would bear that scar for the rest of his life.

"You're giving me palpitations, here. Mind telling me what's going..." Scotty caught Kel's gaze, followed it down. "Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. Not that again. Do not tell me we're going to go into that again!"

Kelly wanted to look up, wanted to retort, but his eyes were riveted on that dent in the smooth skin, the patch of whitish-grey amid the brown, and all he could think of was...

"Hey!" Kelly found himself unceremoniously smacked in the head with a towel. "I'm talking to you!" He looked up. "Were you or were you not wallowing in guilt over your perceived failure?"

In spite of himself, a corner of his mouth quirked up at the phrasing and he felt an urge to respond in kind. "I was not wallowing."

"Well, excuse me. Ever since becoming the partner of the esteemed Kelly Robinson I've had the time, if not the inclination, to bone up on the finer points of the distinction between wallowing, indulging, moping and griping. And I think you were wallowing. But there's possibly a chance that you were moping. But see, I don't think you were moping, because one doesn't mope in guilt, one wallows in it. So if we assume..."

"Hold up! Just who told you I was feeling guilty?"

"With my amazing powers of deduction, I figured it out all by myself."

Why he was being drawn into the banter, he had no idea. It was an irresistible force. "Evidence, Holmes."

"Hmm. First you were staring at my leg. Now being as I know you are a normal red-blooded American male, I deduced that you were not staring at the wonderfulness of my wonderful muscle tone, although it is quite wonderful. It follows that you were staring at something else. Was there a bug on my leg? No, which leads us to this." He put his finger on the scar and wiggled it about.

"Second, you were moping. Or wallowing, the jury's still out on that." Kelly opened his mouth and shut it again. "Now why would you be moping when you just won a difficult match? Perhaps something in your view of my leg set you off, and since it can't be my aforementioned wonderful muscle tone, which is the delight of women the world over..."

"Except last week in Hong Kong..." Kel couldn't resist.

"You're never going to let me live that down, are you? How was I supposed to know she only liked hard drinkers?" Scotty sighed dramatically, pulling his pants on. "The question is why I'd want to date a girl with so little interest in her own health."

"So you let her go for your own good."

"Absolutely."

"You waited up till three in the morning for her."

"Details, details."

"My partner, the kindergartener," Kelly smiled. Then it came back to him. "Here I was getting a perfectly good funk going, and you've ruined it!"

"Oh, pardon me for raining on your parade." Scotty's voice emanated from the recesses of his shirt, now over his head.

Kelly frowned petulantly. "When something's a man's fault, the least he can do is be allowed to mope over it sometimes without the victim of that blunder being so disgustingly cheerful about it!"

"Mope? I thought you were wallowing."

Kelly spluttered with stifled laughter. "You're doing it again!"

"You're making it mighty hard, believe me." Scotty sat on the bench, pulling on his socks. "Besides, I don't appreciate being called a victim like I'm a damsel in distress or something."

"You were shot--"

Scotty whirled in exasperation. "Are we really--really, truly going to go through this again?!"

"I..."

Seeing Kelly's distress, Scott visibly relented. "Kel, I'm just going to ask you one thing. Would you have helped Russ if I had asked you not to?"

Kelly stared, open-mouthed.

"Huh," Scotty smiled, pulling on his other sock. "Speechless. One for the books. I should have brought a camera." Feet suitably clad, he turned to his partner. "So? Would you have done?"

Still frozen, Kelly closed his mouth, opened it again, closed his eyes, opened them, closed them, realized he looked like a fish, and ended up with his mouth closed and his eyes open, staring at Scotty. "I...don't know," he admitted finally. Scotty just waited. "I guess...I... I still wouldn't have killed him, though. Don't think I could have, no matter what."

"Wasn't what I asked," Scott smiled, voice smooth as velvet, and the understanding, the affection, the confidence in that tone knocked Kelly flat.

"No," he agreed, mind reeling. Then he forced himself to answer. "I don't think... no, I wouldn't have helped him if you'd felt there was something hinky about him. If you'd told me."

Scotty smiled and nodded with satisfaction, as though Kelly were a prize pupil and had just given him the correct answer. "So I could have stopped it whenever I said the word."

Kelly gave that a bit of thought, and realized that that was perfectly true. "I just hate it when you're right!"

"And ruin a perfectly good mope."

"Wallow."

"Ah, the quibbling he quibbles...." Scotty's smile turned serious. "There you go. I'm not a victim, and I'm not a damsel in distress, Kel. I'm your partner. We make the decisions together."

"But this decision..."

"Was as much mine as it was yours. I wanted to help him too--I just figured actions speak louder than words, that's all. Sure, he was your friend. What difference does that make? Since when are we hired assassins?"

"We're supposed to kill..."

"In cold blood?"

"If necessary."

"That's not me. Is it you? I don't think so. Does that make us worse agents? Probably. Could I live with you if you were a cold-blooded assassin? I doubt it. Am I a damsel in distress? Hmm..." He fluttered his eyelashes comically. "What do you think, Kel? Do I look like a damsel in distress?"

Kel snorted. "Not a chance. You're not pretty enough."

Scotty placed a hand over his heart. "You sure know how to hurt a guy."

"I'll make it up to you with a double martini. Oh--" Kelly theatrically slapped his forehead-- "I forgot, my partner's in kindergarten. I'll buy you a Coke then."

Scotty smiled. "I may not be a damsel in distress, but at least I'm a cheap date."

"Keep telling yourself that. Maybe Singapore Girl will come back."

"You are getting really repetitious, you know that?"

The banter continued all the way to dinnertime.
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