It's like looking through a foggy glass. Not like the stupor of being drunk or battle rage, mission focus, losing it for a little while. It's like looking back through smoke and fog at a time he's spent decades not remembering, and not needing to remember, because it had no place in his life. The years after he let go it finally becoming so much easier and lighter than the ones he'd held on to them and raged helplessly about a touchable, unreclaimable, loss.

It's a different life, belonging to a different person, with a different family. There's a line in the sand and everything.

"Some." Steve hedged, looking across that line in his head. "I was young, then. There was some dinners, and seeing him at the station when I ended up there, once or twice for Dad, but it really wasn't on my radar to be watching out for what kinds of cops my Dad was rolling out on the press."

Which was true. He was a kid then. Obsessed with surfing, football, the newest cheerleader, his dreams of the Navy.

"But he'd been the last one, and he'd stuck around as my dad's partner up until his retirement."
He gaze shifted to the window and the man, again, voice shifting, just marginally.

"He said my Dad stuck by him even through everything."

Earlier. Before Steve had known exactly what everything entailed, when it was just a detail before a warning.

It wasn't that he was questioning it. If anything, it made sense. The only kind of sense his dad ever made after they crossed that line. Chin had stuck by his father through his wife's accident, sending the kids away, up until his retirement, so John stuck by him through whatever investigation and drum out Chin went through if there wasn't reasonable cause to doubt him.