[DYH] Room 213: Returning after a very long day.

Henning returned to his hotel room and heard something clink against the door as he opened it. He bent down and picked up the object: Charlotte's key, as the voice message on her cell had promised. He hadn't expected to feel so relieved to hear her voice again; relief that had had washed over him in a wave, cleansing the grimy events of the morning from his mind and making him realize how worried he'd been that he didn't know where she'd gone. Such strong emotions, for having met her again only yesterday... But perhaps he was denying the possibility that they'd been there all along.

After a moment's consideration, he grabbed Polly's scrapbook from his dresser and left the room, Charlotte's key held tightly in his other hand. Down the hall, to the right, up the stairs, in front of door number 213... Knock knock, no response. Then he was standing in the room, listening to the sound of a water tap shutting off. A bath was being drawn... No wonder she hadn't noticed him coming in. He heard the rustle of clothing falling to the floor and the lap of water against the sides of the tub as someone got in, followed by a muffled sigh that seemed to go on forever.

He considered the options in front of him for about half a minute. The bathroom door was closed, and he didn't want to interrupt her... He couldn't help himself. Moving quietly, he placed the scrapbook on a side table and set about picking Charlotte's clothes off the floor and laying them neatly on the bed. Had she really been wearing this many articles of clothing when he'd last seen her? It was like some sort of optical illusion, how many there seemed to be... There was a small notepad on the floor as well. This he put on top of the scrapbook, without feeling the need to look inside. There would be time for that later.

Having finally cleared the floor to his satisfaction, Henning straightened up and turned around, just in time to see something sliding out of Charlotte's coat pocket as it hung off the side of the bed. Moving completely by instinct, he darted silently forward and caught it in his left hand before it hit the ground.

...A battered tin of salmon. Strange. Hadn't Charlotte thrown it away? Multiple times? He turned it over to see a dark red stain on the other side, with what looked like a few strands of black hair stuck to it. Henning automatically opened his mouth, whether in shock or to say something, he didn't know... But nothing came out.

Then he went to the window, opened it, and threw the thing out into the yard below as hard as he could.

Henning remained at the window as he turned towards her, the expression on his face unchanged from when he'd discovered the tin of salmon: A mixture of shock, horror, and incomprehension. After a moment, it melted into a kind of stricken release. It took three strides until he was standing in front of her. He pulled her into a damp embrace, not seeming to care that she was soaking the front of his shirt to transparency. It felt like she was trembling, but it was really him. He closed his eyes and breathed in the clean smell of her hair.

"Charlotte, I want to know all about how your day went," he said, after a long, deep breath. "Forgive me, but I have a feeling you'll have a lot more to contribute to what's been happening recently than I will. I think I'm not so good at handling these things as you are... I'm starting to see it, though, pieces of it. I... You should probably get changed."

Even as he said the words, Henning made no move to loosen his arms. He looked down, and saw from over her shoulder the bright spots of color flowing down her back. Flowers, blossoming along gracefully contoured vines. A dark purple petal lay almost right under his nose, as if it had just fallen there, blown from some soft warm breeze...

He kissed it, with the same leaping instinct that had made him throw the salmon out the window. No thought, just pure action. He held the moment like that until the fear lingering in his chest had vanished completely. Then he pulled back and looked into the blue of her eyes.

"Oh, and... hi to you, too."

He could feel his ribs expanding against the tight circle of her arms as he breathed. When she kissed him, he wanted to pull her even closer, lose himself in her, run his hands through her tangled wet hair... But then a cold breeze came through the open window, making them both shiver- her more than him- and he had to break away to close it, before the fear came back. There was no time for warmth, no time to be together. Not with that still out there... Not when he still didn't know exactly what that was.

He turned around with one hand still on the windowsill and said, keeping his voice steady, "All right, Charlotte, it's time for us to start getting to the bottom of this. Now, I'm probably the least equipped person in the world to ask about... things like what's been going on recently. But it's my job to see patterns, and there are connections starting to emerge here... Connections between what happened to your mother, my subway accident, whoever attacked you in the mill, and the car that tried to run us off the road the other night. And there are things even farther back than that, previous cases, the ones I wasn't supposed to tell you about..."

Henning stopped as a strained look danced briefly across his face. He ran his hands through his hair, leaving it all stuck up on one side. "But I did promise to tell you everything," he said, a little weakly. "And I will. I'll tell you anything I think is relevant to our situation. Beyond that, I'm still bound to what's left of my confidentiality agreement to the Bureau; but when you're done telling me what you found out today, I'll explain to you about the Red Seed Profiles. And if Agent York's presence here is any indication, the murder that happened here in Greenvale-" He tapped Polly's scrapbook -"may also be involved somehow. Her name was Anna Graham, and-"

He stopped and blinked, as if he had just noticed one of them was half naked and still dripping water on the hotel carpet. "...Uh, but you should probably get changed first. I'm going to... wait out in the hall. Why don't you knock on the door when you're ready?"

He stood up and waited for her answer. Then he wished he'd just made a statement and left, instead of hesitating after asking a rhetorical question.

Still holding Charlotte's hand, Henning sat down heavily on the bed, then shot up again when he realized he had landed on the pile of clothing he had put there. He settled back down on a clear patch of bedspread and tried not to look so jumpy.

"Well... If you insist," he said. "I'll be here, waiting." Although I'd much rather accompany you, was the thought he would have dearly liked to express out loud, but which was still just slightly outside the boundaries of propriety Henning had drawn for himself long ago. Also, he was a little afraid that Charlotte would take him up on the offer and they'd never get around to doing what they had come here for.

He brought her hand up his mouth and kissed it, then let go with reluctance, as if she was about to board a train headed somewhere far away instead of simply going into the bathroom to change.

Automatically Henning arched up into the kiss, then encircled Charlotte's back with his arms and pulled her down on top of him as he fell back onto the bed. The weight of her body on his, the warm dampness of her skin... Her hair, brushing his face like an intoxicating red curtain... He gave in and ran his fingers through it until he was cupping the back of her head, his lips still pressed to hers. Then he broke away just far enough to whisper:

"Just before you opened the bathroom door... I found a tin of salmon in your coat pocket."

He didn't know about Charlotte, but for Henning, just saying the words had the effect of being doused with a bucket of ice water. He stared paralyzed up into her face and added, "I threw it out the window. You should probably get dressed. I'm so, so sorry."

Henning's brain was struggling with forces it couldn't comprehend.

"This afternoon? Kind enough to return... What?" he yelped. "Who did you talk to? You knew it was there? Who the hell is the Smoking Man?!"

He started writhing out from under Charlotte until he noticed that was just making her towel come even more undone. Then he lay stiffly on his back and flailed his hands vaguely in front of her midriff as if performing some kind of magic trick that would clothe her in an instant.

"Okay, forget about getting dressed," he said, clinging desperately to the final shreds of his composure. "Here's what's going to happen. I'm going to close my eyes and pretend you're not a beautiful woman whose towel I want to remove with my teeth, and we're going to get this over with. The who, what, where, when and why of Charlotte Jacob's day. Do a recap in three sentences or less if you have to."

Somewhere along the line, his attempt to be stern gave way to pleading. "Please, Charlotte, it's imperative... You don't know how hard it is for me to wrap my head around certain... concepts. If I don't concentrate on solid, rock-hard... uh... facts, this is all going to seem like a dream to me when I wake up. And right now, every single thing about you is driving me crazy."

Henning somehow got one arm around her waist and gently lowered her to the bed so they were both lying on their sides, facing each other, legs still tangled together. He held the towel together tightly at her back, even though every nerve in his hand was screaming to the opposite, and said:

"Two questions, then. One, what did you hope to find in the graveyard in the first place, and two, who is it you're trying to protect? What does 'Contritus' have to do with anything?"

There were other things he wanted to say... But he didn't want to alert Charlotte to the amount of danger she had gotten herself into. Not until he had more answers, anyway. She seemed certain this 'Smoking Man' was the same person in both the mill and the driving incidents, and that seemed like a reasonable assumption... But what was all this about puzzles? And if this had anything to do with Anna's murder, how much was he prepared to tell York?

Despite the relief he was feeling at being able to return to the business at hand, another part of him felt like he might enjoy the long, lazy fall all the way to to bottom of those deep blue eyes.