FIC: The Land of Missing Persons (2/3)
Title: The Land of Missing Persons, 2/3 ( part one, part three)
Summary: AU. Two years after getting off the island, Frank learns that happily ever after isn't as easy as it sounds.
Characters: Frank/Danielle; Alex. Canon through 4x08.Rating: PG-13 Disclaimer: No money/ownership here.
Beta: The incomparable and patient elliotsmelliot . Any remaining errors are my own.
Author's note: Comments, feedback, and criticism are always welcome.
Warnings: Signposted in the first chapter; what I hope is reasonable sensitivity toward issues with which I have limited/no first-hand experience.
He didn't need to imagine the tableau in the living room, a week later: Alex, hands together and head mostly down. Juliet, feet angled toward her, a careworn vision. “...you and the primary doctor will need to keep an eye out for that. If you can't stabilize the complications, you'll need an abortion..” Breathy tone, the soft power of a pediatrician to a nervous child
On the island, Frank had counted getting along well with Juliet as a blessing more than a necessity. He liked her company, the equilibrium she still had after everything she'd been through: she was a friend, one he'd made with the speed of intense circumstances. If he'd thought about it, he would have assumed that would continue if they ever got home.
When they did, though... the things she admitted about her island work, the things that came to light beyond that. The reasons she'd been a good recruit in the first place. Frank knew it was complicated for her, but he couldn't shake the way she'd knuckled under and followed all Ben's orders in the end.
So he stood in the kitchen and listened. There was a lot to say, apparently. Alex had never heard about the few terminations Juliet had managed on the island. She didn't follow the news.
Juliet started going over the female anatomy parts of the procedure, and Frank removed himself to the back steps. Danielle was already stationed there, listening in on the measured, dispassionate speech that Frank didn't want to hear. Abortion wasn't a topic that had ever come up between them, or one they could've needed to discuss. Considering everything Danielle had been through, Frank probably would have been cruel to bring it up unnecessarily. Not that he had thought about it either way.
“Why did you bring her here?” Danielle asked, lighting out a cigarette. “If you don't trust her anymore?”
“Alex trusts her,” he said. She still needed to believe in the justifications Juliet had offered to Alex and to herself from the beginning, the magical thinking Juliet used to placate her own conscience. Frank supposed if he could've seen those years of Alex's life he'd be able to understand that need. “Nobody else is going to be able to get across what she needs to hear.” And, unspoken, that Juliet wouldn't dare try anything questionable under Rousseau's watch. She'd handed in her medical license, maybe to soften an inevitable blow, but Frank wasn't surprised that she could still get her hands on everything from transfusion kits to access to an old friend's medical office.
He resisted the urge to bum a cigarette off Danielle, although he'd never smoked. Danielle fumbled the cigarette around without actually smoking it. She'd been doing that ever since the night Alex made her announcement: she went out to get relevant books and stomach-calming ginger - maybe Frank should have paid more attention to Alex's bouts of nausea and fatigue, but she got so many little illnesses - and came back with a couple of packs of cigarettes, although she hadn't smoked in twenty years. She hadn't really started again, just fidgeted and mouthed at the cigarettes when she wasn't sure what she needed to do.
Now, though, she nodded without saying anything, accepting the necessity of Juliet's being there. Alex said she wanted it, but Frank didn't know if she was lying to herself. It was why he'd gone to Miami to retrieve Juliet from her anonymous, clerical life and the little apartment in the bad neighbourhood. He didn't know what had motivated her to acquiesce: concern for Alex, the money Frank offered, the unspoken knowledge that he could make one phone call and cue some people in that the day labourer she lived with didn't sound as Cajun as any James Martineau should and looked a lot like a man who'd died in a plane crash.
Whatever the reason, she came. She gave Alex's doctor the records from her work on the island, from her nightmare little fertility shop, and she kept emergency-care everything stocked at the house. Apparently she was resigned to a tense stay in the guest bedroom until Alex cleared the second-trimester danger zone. Alex seemed reassured by it, at any rate.
The fragile equilibrium in the house lasted until Danielle caught on to the details of Frank's arrangements. He should have known it would happen, he supposed, but he hadn't wanted to think about her reaction. He was half grateful that she waited at least until they were alone to round on him: “Is that why you brought her here? If Alex should change her mind. If she gets sick?”
He knew better than to lie. “That's a lot of it.”
“There are doctors here.”
Frank didn't argue the point. “I think it would be easier for her to have Juliet take care of it in her old friend's office,” he said carefully.
“The endocrinologist?”
“Juliet's got the equipment she needs. She'll do a safe job.”
“To protect herself.”
“It doesn't matter why.”
“And you think, what - that Alex should be ashamed to decide? Make it a secret, if there are problems?”
“I think she shouldn't have to deal with going to a clinic,” Frank said, and he got into the first real fight he'd ever had with Danielle.
They didn't argue, as a rule. Frank knew about Robert and could guess what Danielle would associate with any kind of intimate dispute. He'd made a rule for himself that they'd determine in advance who was responsible for which decisions, and another for when they still couldn't agree. If Danielle was demonstrably, catastrophically wrong, he'd shut up and wait her out. If it was anything less than that, she won, full stop.
They lost it within seconds of each other, restraint abandoned and pounding the counters. Danielle wanted to know if Frank thought this was Texas - it wasn't, Frank told her, but it was a long fucking way from most of Europe - if he thought Alex was some delicate creature who hadn't faced a thousand worse things, if he thought he was her father to arrange all this. He could've smashed his fist through a wall at that one, but instead he went straight from pointing out that Danielle wasn't being fair to him to telling her that the protesters would have her provoked to aggravated assault charges in no time and that was just what they all needed now, wasn't it, and she and Alex had no idea what the fuck they'd be getting into.
May had been a little green to crew a 767, but she was multilingual enough to get seniority fast. She and Frank didn't talk shop, and he was never really clear on why she'd become a flight attendant in the first place. People became pilots for the same set of reasons, and Frank doubted she'd be interested in hearing his iteration of them. He never harboured any illusion that she was really interested in him. He was eleven years older and just into his second divorce; she was fresh off a break-up and was looking for a little fun to tide her over to the next relationship.
Even trying to flirt with flight attendants wasn't as common as most people seemed to think, although Frank still prided himself on a better success rate than most of the pilots who did try it. He took the old joke for a cautionary tale: What does a pilot say halfway through a first date? “But enough about flying; let's talk about me.” There were professional hazards he made sure to avoid: aviator's preening, trying to impress them, bad-mouthing the gay colleagues they were friends with. That, he supposed, and in the gossipy little world of an airline, his reputation preceded him: he didn't trade on lies, get pushy, or leave anyone unsatisfied with the service.
He and May went through the same routine as everyone else who mixed their business with pleasure. Whenever the two of them were assigned to the same flight rotation, in their case some variation of a shuttlecock across the north Pacific, they'd wind up in his hotel room for a drink to celebrate a good day's flying or get a bad one off their minds. Semi-acceptable gin, Frank had learned early on, was easily had in convenience stores the world over, along with soda water and juice if his company didn't like it straight. May was partial to a glass or two of one of the citrus mixes - gimlet if there was lime juice, greyhound if there wasn't - and Frank, sleazy son of a bitch that he was, was partial to pouring the last half-finger into the hollow of a woman's neck and drinking it off her skin, if she'd let him.
May would let him. They were a good pair, insofar as they needed to be. May wasn't shy about having plenty of fun between the sheets, which drove Frank crazy in the best way possible. They didn't have divergent expectations or the kind of dynamic that changed anything on the job. Looking back, Frank should have known it would all go to hell.
They both saw the situation clearly once it did; there was no need to soul-search or really discuss anything. Self-delusion wasn't a trait that benefited aviation careers. Frank had the decency to take a few medical days at the same time she did and go to the clinic with her. San Francisco, where they were both based and May actually lived, was the kind of place with relatively few people making a fuss outside. Still, a handful of fanatics were inevitable anywhere, holding blown-up pictures of sixth-month miscarriages and chanting baby killer.
What surprised Frank was how much they bothered him. May ignored the little line of them the same way she did obnoxious passengers, but it was all Frank could do to walk alongside her and keep control. He tried to pretend he was only feeling a pilot's anger on behalf of a disrespected stewardess, which was both easier and harder when he recognized one sign-waver as a repeat passenger, the wife of a business-frequent who sometimes brought her along. It was the first time in Frank's adult life he'd wanted to hit a woman, and he only resisted because creating a scene wouldn't make things any easier for May.
He spent what seemed like an eternity in a waiting room that was nicer than a lot of departure lounges stateside. That wasn't saying much, but at least it was clean and had some low-maintenance plants. There was no eye contact or acknowledgement between its grim-faced occupants. Most of them looked to be worthless bastards like him, albeit younger; the only people his age must have been the parents of girls who still looked like children.
Frank's memory insisted on replaying moments from the last couple of months: Deciding on a lucky room at the SeaTac airport hotel. May's eagerness to get undressed after turbulence splashed orange juice on her uniform during the last cabin service before they landed in Seoul. Hotel rooms with stock-patterned furnishings; fumbling with the gin and condoms. That was what it came down to in the end, Frank thought: he could keep a two-hundred-ton metal contraption on a thousand-mile precision course, he could use demonically sophisticated control systems in split-second emergencies, and he'd been too drunk to roll a piece of rubber onto his own dick.
Afterwards he made an effort at being gallant and keeping things together. He offered to let May talk or cry or do whatever she needed to do, or just sat with her in half-lit hotel rooms. But it was no time at all before they drifted apart, and neither one of them was sorry when an assignment rotation formalized the state of affairs. He heard through the grapevine that she'd taken a ground job at some point, but they made no pretense of staying in touch.
Frank tried to get his life back in order for a while anyway, even without her. He quit drinking for a few months, until he couldn't stand it anymore. All things considered, he decided, a vasectomy beat sobriety, and he fell off the wagon against medical advice with ice on his balls and a Mets game on TV. In another few months he was back in the game, screwing his liver and his cabin crew, and living without regrets.
Danielle slept on Alex's floor after the fight. She'd wind up there sometimes with some insomnias and nightmares, curled on top of an extra blanket, but there had never been the quality of shunning Frank, just needing Alex. Frank let her have her space. It was five nights before she came back to their bed, after he found her sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for him. “I've never thought I was her father,” he said. It was hard to keep his voice low enough not to disturb Alex. “There's never been one second I pretended to be.”
“I know.” The words hung in the air, waiting for an explanation Danielle didn't know how to demand.
Frank told her as little beyond the facts and lesson as he could. He didn't mention when it had happened: while Danielle had been getting used to hell and some freak was teaching Alex her multiplication tables. He didn't tell her that he'd seen May as a passenger at a boarding gate years later and realized that the minors she was accompanying were her kids. He had wanted to say something to her, wanted to meet them, but in the end he decided it was better to clear out before she could see him.
Danielle listened without speaking. When Frank fell quiet she put a hand on his arm and sat with him in the evening light, and it occurred to him how rarely he gave Danielle the chance to comfort him, to reciprocate. Maybe it wasn't fair of him. No, not maybe: it wasn't fair of him, not much more than it was fair to ask her to sympathize now.
He shook himself mentally. Excuses for thinking like a maudlin teenager expired on your twentieth birthday. “Good one on my part, right?” He was surprised at how his voice sounded.
“I am still here, aren't I?” Danielle said, and Frank could've imagined without seeing her face the tilted head, the strange little smile.
Danielle is tense in the way she tends to be after a hard day that hasn't seen anything specifically bad happen. A quiet massage is the best start to remedying that, in Frank's experience. He's good at giving them - another piloting skill, rubbing and exercising the cramps out after hours in a plane, and in Frank's case doing both of them drunk. It doesn't take much brain power, really, but it goes better when you're sober.
He slips most of her clothes off and sets his hands to the scarred terrain. Danielle's body is becoming more familiar to him, reliably sinewy, after readjustment, where it used to vary in its excess of thinness according to the food supply. She's pretty much indifferent to matters of vanity. She hasn't added any new scars to her collection, most of which she couldn't spare the trouble of remembering how she'd acquired. There are exceptions to that: some on her calves and forearms from the initial wreck; a vine puncture in her thigh from Alex's birth, which came close to killing her. Frank has found himself wondering occasionally if things might have gone differently if she'd been able to move faster afterwards, but it's no good to dwell on it.
He turns his eyes to the bullet's exit scar she sustained because seventeen years later, Frank had let himself believe he could plan ahead of the psychopath he was flying onto the island, let himself be satisfied that he was ferrying Keamy to a bad location without any targets around. There are some people, and were some, who'd be better off if Frank had flown into a plunge: An acceleration and a steep descent, a bang!, a fireball: no scar, no grave, nothing to leave an impact on Alex that would make a face full of shrapnel look like a sweet deal by comparison. Sometimes Frank's almost wished that Alex was visibly affected, looked abnormal in some way, so that people wouldn't think she was doing okay or expect her to carry on normally. People like you, old man? Frank didn't know why he'd ever assumed it would help her if no one thought she didn't fit in, she wasn't okay, and there wasn't one goddamned thing in their power to help.
“What's wrong?” Danielle asks.
“Nothing much,” Frank says. She's never had the luxury of blaming him for it or been inclined to grant that luxury to him. He waited on her while she recovered from the gunshot, helped Bernard with the disgusting routine of draining the wound when it got abscessed. Danielle stopped him the one time he tried to get across how miserably fucking sorry he was for what happened: “You did the best thing you knew. You can't make it better now.” Frank's replayed that in his head an awful lot of times.
He sets to the massage. Danielle snuggles down into the mattress the way she always does, still conscious of the novelty of sleeping on something other than a node of roots and rock outcrops. Frank's at the point of taking it for granted again. He pulls his mind back from where it's been wandering and focuses on how badly he wants a drink.
Danielle lies there contentedly once he's done, in the way Frank's come to recognize as her working through what's happened in the day. When they hear Alex stirring, he urges Danielle to stay where she is. “You rest a little. I'll see if she needs anything.”
Danielle hesitates for a minute but then nods her consent. “If she asks for me - ”
“I'll come get you straight away.”
He makes it to the kitchen in time to see Alex stagger in with the late-term waddle of someone who's normally thin. “How are you doing?” he asks.
“Fine. Starving.”
“I think your mom's got something ready - ”
“An omelette?” She sounds like it's pretty urgent.
“I can make an omelette for you.” That, he thinks, is probably the sum total of all the good he's ever done her: putting together a goddamn omelette. She's never really had the luxury of blaming him either, or maybe she just has too many other people left to be mad at. “What do you want in it?”
“Munster cheese and olives. Both kinds of olives.”
Frank doesn't argue. “How was your appointment?”
“Fine. Nothing surprising.”
“'Nothing surprising' is good, right?”
“Yeah. I didn't get to the pool today, though..”
"Missing one day isn't going to do any harm.” Alex has been vigilant since day one about the doctor's regime of nutrition and exercise and prenatal vitamins and a million goddamn things that probably don't make any difference whatsoever. Frank's resisted pointing any of it out; she and they would just find something else to worry about.
“I'm having some people over for a game night in half an hour,” Alex says.
“Might as well have fun while you're awake for it,” Frank says, for the sake of saying something. He fusses with the omelet. “As long as nobody tries to beat me at poker or teach me mah jongg.” What he means is as long as it keeps your mind off things.
Frank got vigilant about watching for danger signs and adapted to being sent out at all hours when a craving hit. Whatever Alex ate she threw up not much later, and the hormonal misery kicked in with all of that. Frank wasn't sure all the hovering Danielle and Juliet did were necessarily helpful; Alex needed room to breathe, after all. Frank restricted himself to grocery runs and pinch-hitting nausea support, figuring it wouldn't do Alex any good to have a third person fussing over her all the time too. Not that she didn't need some help: everything sub-fatal that could go wrong did go wrong, to Frank's eye. Alex's doctor said at one point that it was what he'd expect to see in someone with twice her body mass index - or twice her age, Juliet pointed out. Or twice her age. The was a pall in the room when Juliet said it, a mixture of fear and the weight of memory
“I still want this,” Alex said pre-emptively at one point, as she segued from vomiting to crying.
Frank pressed a damp cloth to her forehead. “Do you mean that or are you just saying it?” He supposed he shouldn't have been surprised that she took a swing at him. It was a weak one, and she missed.
He asked more carefully after that, but he asked until he was sure beyond any doubt she meant it. After that he tried to keep up with Alex's symptoms, which weren't abating the way a lot of women's did, and he weathered the inevitable phone call with Bryce. There wasn't a discreet way around hearing Alex's half of the conversation and then some - Bryce was sorry he'd ever met her, he wanted nothing to do with any of it,the whole nine yards - and it was Frank who was at home. He debated giving her some privacy afterwards, but in the end he brought the Kleenex to her room, where she was as balled up as she could manage on the bed. Frank pulled a chair up and handed her a tissue. “Should I say something reassuring or keep my trap shut?” he asked.
“Whatever.” Alex blew her nose ineffectually. “I should've known this would happen, right?”
Frank didn't have anything worth saying there. “I know you hoped he'd stick around.”
“I wanted - I just wanted...” She broke off into crying and didn't manage to tell Frank what she'd wanted, if she even knew.
He squeezed her shoulder. “Sweetheart. It's going to be all right.”
“How?” She took another tissue. “You don't even think I know what I'm doing.”
It wasn't a matter of thinking, he barely resisted the urge to say. “This wasn't the way I imagined things.” Might as well acknowledge the obvious, if he was careful. “I thought this was five, ten years down the line.”
“What good would that do?”
Frank's inclination was to talk about finishing school or figuring out what she wanted, but she wouldn't see the point. “I thought you'd be a little bit more used to things here,” he offered as a substitute. “Settled down next door with whoever comes closest to being good enough for you.”
“Yeah, well. Good luck making that work.”
“It'll turn out in the end, kiddo. Hell, it even did for me.” He doubted Alex would believe that much more than he did, but she was too busy crying to object.
He spent more time away from the house, away from the tension with Juliet and the way Danielle developed a taste for whatever Alex was craving. He took to beach-combing and plane-spotting when he wasn't at work, and he made life hell for the trainees and the pilots on routine certification renewal when he was. That was his job, of course, making sure people could successfully handle intricate crises under the most stressful circumstances he could dream up. Everyone involved in the industry knew that about the position: if an instructor didn't make whoever who stepped into the full-motion simulator despise him, he was endangering the life of every man, woman, and child who stepped onto that person's plane.
So Frank occupied himself with keeping up-to-date on the latest unlikely scenarios that had been thought of or made possible or actually happened, and he spent extra time poring over all the old ones looking for things that might have been overlooked. Being the kind of son of a bitch his job required didn't come naturally to him, but immersing himself in emergency data and working out what could have gone differently, to better or worse effect, could bring that side out pretty well. Total engine failure and a wing loss? He found a way to replicate the motion exactly. Pilots couldn't handle nighttime hydraulic failure over the Andes if they were on fire at the same time? They'd better learn. He programmed half a dozen flight scenarios that actually violated the laws of physics and went appropriately apeshit when no one called it out.
He had the urge to drink and called his A.A. sponsor like the lady next door used to pack her unruly kids off to confession - to save her own sanity, Frank knew in hindsight. He ogled the liquor at every store he went into and started going to extra A.A. meetings. He was a complete fuck-up for needing it, he figured, but that wouldn't change if he stopped hauling his pickled ass in to moan about having the same goddamn problem as everyone else. None of it got easier once Alex was in the clear, although in the clear was only in old-island terms. The obstetrician didn't mince words. No learning the sex, no choosing names, no outfitting the nursery. Don't get attached.
Effective stress relievers at home were in short supply, barring Danielle's habit of being Alex's prenatal-exercise partner. Frank offered whatever half-baked distractions he could and made a pastime of sky-watching with Danielle. The view was reasonably good, if not old-island-calibre, from their backyard. Alex was never interested, so it became a pastime for Frank and Danielle to share: they were near the house if they were needed, but it was quiet. Calm. They'd lie on a picnic blanket to look at the stars and listen to the night and think about as little as possible; occasionally it devolved into their making out like teenagers and taking things inside.
He was tense that night, hating a decision, putting it off. He was stiff and remote, and it made the silence uncomfortable. He wanted Danielle to say something, but she waited for him to talk. When she turned toward him and put a hand on his shoulder, he drew it away. “Alex is going to be this baby's mother,” he said, not wanting to look at her. “You don't get a second chance.”
She worked her hand free and rolled aside completely. For a long time she was silent: suppressing rage, Frank thought, or wanting to sleep. He was about to go inside when she said, “I know.”
Juliet stayed on for an extra week after Alex got past the danger mark, either as a precaution or for reasons of her own that she didn't disclose. Frank worked at staying cordial with her while he made arrangements to get her back home. Josh's flight school was in Dade County, and at the last minute Frank decided to work in a week's visit to him. Danielle and Alex needed some mother-daughter time, and Frank could stand to clear his head while they took it.
He packed like a pilot, pragmatically and without excess, and walked on eggshells around Juliet in order to avoid any last-minute blowups. She was just as happy to avoid talking to him. Danielle was nervous, Alex was exhausted, and Frank's A.A. sponsor was probably sick of hearing from him. Frank let himself get annoyed that nobody was taking advantage of the higher-line Airbus' capabilities to run direct flights between Honolulu and Miami Not that many people who lived in one vacationed in the other, but still. He lamented the situation to his colleagues and befuddled everyone else by fixating on it.
Danielle beat him to bed the night before departure, which wasn't normal: usually he still turned in early, as if he were resting up to fly the plane instead of ride it. He found her sitting at the foot of the bed, looking down at the blanket in the dim lamp-light. He settled himself toward the pillows. “Long day for you?” he asked.
She half-shrugged but didn't say anything, which Frank interpreted as meaning that her mind was elsewhere. He sat and let his mind wander for a while, available if she found something she wanted to say or got an itch that needed scratching, neither one unlikely. She just stayed as she was, though, and eventually Frank switched the lamp off and let his eyes adjust to the weak moonlight filtering in. Danielle murmured something as he was turning down the covers, but he didn't catch it. “What's that?” he asked.
“I remember it,” she said. “That night.”
“Which night?”
“When Alex was a baby.”
He was turning the lamp on again and he froze. “You remember?” A whisper.
“Yes.”
“Why do you remember that?”
“Did you think I could have forgotten it?”
She'd forced herself to forget other things, Frank was pretty sure. “I wish - ”
“No wishing.” Sharp; she'd set it long before, in such a way it didn't need repeating. “I had to remember.”
Frank didn't need her to tell him why. “Why are you - ?” He broke off and swallowed. “Why are you telling me now?”
“It doesn't matter.”
She told him.
He understood, somehow, that he wasn't supposed to move, stayed where he was and looked at a point between Danielle's shoulders. She didn't move either. There was nothing in her voice. Frank wasn't sure how long she spoke.
He didn't interrupt her. He didn't ask questions. When she was done speaking she just sat there, motionless as ever and not-looking straight ahead, before she curled up like a dog at his feet.
He turned off the light, eventually, but he didn't try to sleep. Thinking was out of the question too.
Eventually he got up and helped himself to one of Juliet's lemonades for the sake of a familiar action. He heard Alex stirring and prayed she wouldn't make her way into the kitchen. He couldn't imagine how Danielle had fallen asleep - but she did every night, had for twenty years.
When he went back to the bedroom she was awake again, loose-haired and needy. Sex for comfort, for contact, wasn't a complete aberration, but this time... Frank was numb from his head to his feet, in no state to give what she was asking. He offered what he could and fell short, winding up resting his head on her lap and fighting back the tears. Her eyes were dry when he kissed her and tried to apologize, couldn't find the words. He tried to get back to the task and accomplished nothing, his body cold.
(part three)
Image credits: MorgueFile,
navras_rheya
,
pepsi_boyfriend
,
grafik_strategy
,
marylou_gr
, imdb,
rockthesoul
,
isis2015.