#jay halstead x reader
Words: 1165
Warnings: Canonical violence
Part 1|Part 2|Part 3|Part 4 | Part 5|Part 6|Part 7
“Talk to me, Halstead.” Kim presses as she notices the distraught look on his face, shifting in the car seat. He looks at her briefly before looking back at the warehouse they’re staking out.
“What do you expect me to talk about?” He asks curtly, snapping some photos of a couple of suspicious looking guys that exit the warehouse.
“About whatever is on your mind, because you’re clearly not yourself today.”
“I’m fine, Kim.” He mutters, this time capturing pictures of a van that’s entering the warehouse. “Can we focus on this stakeout, please?”
“For someone who’s supposed to go undercover and be convincing, you’re shit at lying.” She rants, crossing her arms. Jay turns, looking at her like she had just had the most brilliant idea ever.
“Undercover!” He exclaims, pulling out his phone and calling Voight. “Boss, I have an idea about how we can crack the case.”
-
The next day he finds himself regretting his decision. They suspected it was just some relatively harmless arms dealing, but when Jay finally earned the ringleader’s trust to get into his house and see the massive network of underground tunnels and bunkers, he quickly realized there had to be something else going on.
“Should I invest in one of those?” Jay half-jokes, pointing at the bunkers. The ringleader, Eric, turns to Jay and gives him an unsettling grin.
Eric is scrawny and pale, his eyes bug out of his skull and are glazed more often than not, making his stare disturbing; Jay finds himself on the receiving end of that stare too many times to his taste.
“If you value surviving, probably. But we still have some empty bunkers, you can claim one for yourself.” Eric’s grin grows wider when he notices the confusion on Jay’s face. “Let’s just say we do business with more than one kind of weapons.”
Every siren in Jay’s mind goes off with that sentence: Eric deals biological weapons. Jay gives him a nod, wrecking his mind for an excuse to leave and contact the rest of Intelligence.
“Maybe I could just skip town, no?” Jay suggests, shrugging. “I don’t do well in closed spaces.”
Eric raises a brow at him, smirking.
“In that case, you should skip the state.” The scrawny man says, laughing.
“And when is that going to happen? To book a way to bail.” Jay says, eyeing the man in search of a sign that he’s getting suspicious but not finding any.
“Some time in the next month. The December snow won’t be white this year.”
Jay gets goosebumps from Eric’s laugh, quietly pressing the volume key on his phone the way Mouse programmed it to ring a fake call. A few seconds later the ringtone floods the empty room and Jay excuses himself, exiting the room to take the “call”. Upon returning, he gives Eric a bullshit excuse about how one of his shipments got busted at the borders and he must go and find a way to bail his courier.
Jay doesn’t notice the way Eric frowns as he turns his back on him, or how he grabs his phone and sends a text to one of his contacts.
Jay rushes into a deserted alley, spotting the surveillance truck on the other side of the street. Adam meets him in the alley, disguised as a homeless man.
“You look spooked.” Adam comments as they move further down the alley to avoid prying eyes.
“They’re also moving bioweapons.” Jay blurts, watching as Adam’s eyes go wide. “Yeah, and apparently, they’re doing something next month, statewide.”
“Does he have any other warehouse or anything of the sort? Something off the records?”
“Not that I know of, but I’ve only been in his ring for a day. He wouldn’t tell me about a bioweapon stash just like that.” Jay sighs. “I’m going to press for it later today after I ‘deal’ with my courier.”
“Take this.” Adam says, slipping him a small ceramic blade. “There’s a tracker and a bug embedded in the hilt, and Voight said the stress word is ‘Marine’. We’ll be as close to you as we can.”
Jay stalls for a bit, eventually sending Eric a text through his undercover phone about how the courier thing took longer than expected and that he’ll go back to meet with him tomorrow.
He can’t really sleep, not only due to the noise provided by the bad neighborhood his undercover apartment was in, but mostly due to fear and nerves about the assignment. He isn’t one to feel like this often, but when it comes to something he can’t quite control, he feels uneasy.
His mind betrays him and drifts to you and your kiss. He knows it was wrong, but it felt so right; it felt like you connected most of the broken pieces that litter his heart. But you’re engaged, and not even the fact that you’re having second thoughts makes it ok for him to kiss you or try to take you away from Carl.
Clearly, Carl had been there when Jay couldn’t, when Jay didn’t even remember you existed, and he has to accept it, has to accept that even though he found a lost part of himself in you, you’re out of reach; and even if you were within reach, he had been through a lot with his recovery from Deft Hawk, his time as a Detective, and Erin, and it would be unfair to dump all of that on top of a woman that clearly already had more than enough to deal with on her own.
He drifts off to sleep with thoughts of you and wonders of what relationship you really had during your deployment.
The second he steps into the warehouse in the morning, a blunt instrument meets the back of his head and he crumbles to the floor. When he comes to, there’s a black bag on his head and he can feel his arms restrained behind his back. He feels the small ceramic blade resting against his calf, cursing inwardly for putting it out of his reach.
He hears steps coming towards him and tenses up as the bag is removed, revealing Eric standing in front of him with a disapproving look on his face.
“Did you really think you were going to trick me, Detective Halstead?” Eric spits as Jay looks around, noticing the several barrels surrounding them on the small room.
“No, not really. I just hoped to stall you enough to get evidence on you.” Jay remarks, earning a punch by one of Eric’s goons. He feels the metallic taste of blood in his mouth and spits it out before looking back at Eric. “This is your bio stash, huh? Anthrax?”
“What leads you to believe that?” Eric snarls, unintentionally letting Jay know he’s right.
“Well, I don’t have to be a specialized marine to get that those barrels are hazardous.” He says, silently praying that his team would get the message.
-
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Request:You were in the army with Jay and Lindsey finds out your back after answering jays phone and it being jays brother will, so Lindsey lies and tells Jay it was nothing an then after his shift he goes to see his brother after work an will brings it up an says Lindsey said he would tell him an he puts it all together an realizes Lindsey knew how he truly felt for you an ends up seeing you at the bar he’s in with his brother and you were drinking
A/N: I ended up making this kinda sad or something…
✰ ✰ ✰ ✰
You had thought about reaching out to Jay when you found yourself back in Chicago but you didn’t know exactly where he was in his life, aside from what you’d heard the last time you’d been home five years ago, and you didn’t want to come crashing in when he didn’t really need you there stirring things up. But a trip home to Chicago, especially one that was turning out to be more long term than you’d anticipated, was too tempting a reason to see Jay to pass on, especially when you’d run into Will at Med.
“Look, if you don’t wanna call him, I will, no sweat.” Will promised, typing a report on the computer in front of him while you leaned against the nurses’ station. “He’ll be happy to hear from you.”
“Yeah, he was happy to hear from me last time too, and then his whole relationship with Abby imploded and I literally took off on him.” You replied, cracking your knuckles to relieve the tension in your body. “I don’t want to see him and screw him over again.”
“Do you plan on screwing him over?” Will asked, honestly, looking as though he might actually be reconsidering reaching out to his brother for you.
Of course you weren’t planning on screwing him over but then, who plans that sort of thing anyway? You’d really wanted to stay last time but things with your mom had been so strained after your dad’s death, it felt suffocating even being in the same state as her. Now here you were, back home to take care of her, in the ED, waiting for her doctor to discharge her with an all-clear.
“No, I didn’t plan on it last time either I just…Will, you know I love your brother but, if he’s got someone or if he’s in a good place, I don’t want to be the reason that fails on him. Jay deserves the world, regardless of who gives it to him.”
“I’ll give him a call.”
Will left out the part where Jay was in a relationship for the first time since you left. Maybe not the healthiest one at times but a relationship all the same and Will knew he was putting all his effort into trying to make it work. And it wasn’t like Will didn’t like Erin, he had nothing against his brother’s partner turned partner, but he couldn’t deny that a small part of him still rooted for the two of you.
So he didn’t mention Erin and he called his brother for you, early in the morning before his next shift. The one person he didn’t want to talk to answered the phone, Jay having been in the shower at the time, and Will left a message with Erin that you were in town (giving only your name and that you’d been in the rangers with Jay).
-
“There he is,” Will clapped his brother on the shoulder, sliding onto the barstool next to him and flagging Herrmann down with his other hand, ordering two beers, “so?”
“So?” Jay asked, an amused look crossing his face as he swiveled just enough to look at his brother. Will was smiling like he was in on something that Jay imagined he was supposed to be in on too. The only problem being that he had no idea what it was.
Will’s smile slowly faded as he realised that Jay had no idea what he was hinting at. Taking a sip of his beer first, he asked if Jay had reached out to you, “I called and said they were in town…Lindsay said she’d let you know.”
“Oh,” Jay stuttered for a second, hesitating over an answer that wouldn’t make it seem like his girlfriend had lied to his brother and withheld information, “yeah…I just, haven’t called yet. Work’s been crazy.”
“Well listen, I saw them in the ED with their mom yesterday, said they’re in Chicago permanently.”
“Permanently as in temporarily?” Jay replied, unable to conceal the slight edge to his voice. He’d heard that line before, straight from your mouth after he left Abby for you. Chicago was it for you back then and he’d stupidly believed that you were telling the truth only to be burned when you left, apologizing up and down like it would do any good.
“Look, I know last time things didn’t exactly work out-”
“More than that Will. I’m with Erin, I’m in a good place. I’m not digging up the past just because they rolled back into town.” Jay drank the last of his beer and then swiveled his chair away from his brother, “I gotta go.”
“Come on man, I just got here. Just stay, I won’t mention them again, I promise.” Will urged, looking somewhat apologetic though he really wasn’t at all. He didn’t want to push Jay and he definitely didn’t want to tell his brother that he at least could let you explain yourself, so he just rolled back on his hardline, choosing to drink and be happy rather than drink and be alone.
“Fine,” Jay sighed, “I don’t wanna hear about it again though.” It was bad enough that his mind was running through all the reasons Erin had withheld her conversation with Will from him, circling back to the same one again and again. He’d never told her but she was good at her job, it didn’t take much for her to figure it out.
Will shook his head, mild amusement overtaking his features as he glanced again at the table in the back. Whatever kind of serendipity that was, “don’t turn around then.”
Jay did exactly what his brother told him not to do, spinning around in his chair and looking behind him to one of the booth-style tables. There you were, drinking with Mouse of all people. He should’ve known that Will wasn’t the only person you’d reach out to, though it stung more than he cared to admit to know that you’d called Mouse before you’d called him directly. Whatever Will kept saying, whether it was true or not, it seemed more like you wanted to see everyone but Jay.
“Just go say hi,” Will urged.
Without saying anything else Jay got up for the second time, not headed for the door but your table instead. He set his beer bottle down first, both you and Mouse turning to look at him, the conversation dying down.
“Jay,” you stood up, hesitant for a moment and then wrapping your arms around him in a hug. He wrapped one arm around your waist. “I didn’t know if you got my message-”
“Will told me you were here,” he replied as you pulled away, not mentioning anything about Erin. It wasn’t relevant anyway, not right now. Though he couldn’t help wondering if Mouse had said anything.
“Sorry I didn’t call you…I wasn’t sure you’d really want to see me,” you explained.
Mouse offered Jay a knowing smile, as if he was in on something that Jay wasn’t completely sure he understood, before standing up and patting his best friend on the back, “I’m gonna go get a refill, let you guys catch up.”
You watched Mouse walk to the bar before turning back to Jay, “Greg looks good, he told me you got him a job so he’s legit now.”
“Yeah, he really fits in.”
“Jay look, I know last time things didn’t exactly, work out-”
“Didn’t work out? You up and left Chicago and I didn’t hear from you for a month and then it was just a ‘sorry I bailed’ text.” Jay replied.
“I know, I just…it was hard for me to be here.”
“And it’s easier now?” He asked. When Will mentioned you being home there was a part of Jay that just wanted to see you but there was another part of him, the part that was still angry, that wanted you to know how much you hurt him.
“Just different circumstances. I wasn’t gonna tell you I was even here I just wanted to see you,” You explained.
Jay took a sip of his beer, glancing toward the door as it opened and Erin walked in with Burgess. He looked back over to you, “I’m just not sure I’m ready to see you yet…sorry.”
“No, it’s okay…I understand.” You nodded, “I’ll let you, get back to everyone. Tell Greg I said goodbye.”
