Traveler Fic:: Acceptable Losses (Kim/Chambers)
#01 - Ring
Before they started dating, she’d waited three weeks for Jay to call her, even as she told herself she wasn’t that type of girl; now, staring at her cell after Tyler’s abrupt hang up, she mentally counts out two months, and wonders if she’ll ever stop waiting for the phone to ring.
#02 - Hero
They called him a hero, pinned a medal to his chest and slapped him on the back so hard that it’s not until years later, standing in his office, watching the clock and waiting for the call about the Drexler he knows is coming, when he finally feels the strings.
#03 - Memory
She’s certain of Jay’s innocence, but when the clarity of her belief is challenged by his own, she’s ashamed to find herself combing her memory for signs that she might be wrong.
#04 - Box
He knows she’s going to be trouble the moment they lose the trace on Burchell’s call, and every instinct tells him to arrest her here and now, get her cleanly out of the way, but he can’t stand the thought of putting her in a box.
#05 - Run
When he looks at her, really looks at her, her mind whispers one word, ‘run’, but it’s too late and she’s already ensnared.
#06 - Hurricane
The apartment looks as though a gale force wind has come through-drawers pulled out, clothing strewn everywhere, most of it for visual impact, exactly as he wanted-but she’s barely moved by the destruction, calm as the eye of a storm, and he can’t help his admiration.
#07 - Wings
After being released from jail, she starts to think of Chambers as her ally, a dark-suited, starched-shirt guardian angel, and she has to remind herself over and over that even Lucifer once had wings.
#08 - Cold
He knows he’s a cold man; he’s been chastised for it by his ex-wife, praised for it by Freed, but it’s never bothered him until Doherty looks at him like she’d expected something else.
#09 - Red
The monotony her parent’s life never hit her until now, when she thinks she might suffocate under its weight, and she jumps at the red message light on her cell-phone, listening with vague disappointment as her best girlfriend prattles on with stilted apologies and hollow promises, only realizing after the voicemail is over that she’d been hoping for him.
#10 - Drink
Two fingers of Glenlivet, no more, no less, he’s never had a drink during an investigation before, but then . . . everything about this time is different.
#11 - Midnight
The hour she and Jay have together is heaven, everything else fading away beneath the heat of his touch, the feel of his lips on her skin; for that hour things are simple and she loves him just as much as she ever has, but the clock strikes midnight, the fairytale ends, and the only thing she knows anymore is she’ll help him.
#12 - Temptation
He’s accepted the fact that he might have to kill Marlow, but he’s never wanted to, not until she has the audacity to go to Doherty and dangle before her the temptation of hope.
#13 - View
From the balcony of the club, she watches as Jay meets with Marlow, watches as his carefully laid plan goes to hell, until she can no longer afford to be a spectator, to let her life be decided without her input, and she acts.
#14 - Music
Even as she’s led out of the club in handcuffs, her eyes find his, gaze half-defiant, half-scared, and the moment is enough to tell him what he needs to know-she’s chosen her tune; she’ll have to pay the piper.
#15 - Silk
He's been treating her like silk, something delicate to be handled just so, lest it be ruined forever, but as he sends the chair skittering across the floor of the interview room, she sets her jaw, and gets ready to prove she's just as strong as silk, too.
#16 - Cover
Doherty’s body slams into the wall with more force than necessary as the agents cuff her, do what he refuses to do himself; if anyone comments on the fact that the SAC has grown too good to make his own arrests, well . . . years with Hometown have taught him to cover his weaknesses at any cost.
#17 - Promise
Over eight hours later, as she rubs at her steel-bitten wrists, wincing at the pain and her own naïve sense of betrayal, she still can’t find the moment in her memory when Chambers promised to protect her, and she doesn’t know why she thought he had.
#18 - Dream
Borjes comes to him that night, sits on down with a glass of the Glenlivet, and begins to converse like they’re the good friends they never were in life, the congenial atmosphere only marred by the still bleeding gunshot wound, and though it haunts him longer than any previous nightmare, like all his dreams it fades eventually.
#19 - Candle
"Where. Is. Agent. Chambers?" she asks, enunciating each word slowly, mockingly, letting the perverse pleasure at the interrogators scowl at her words, the only ones she ever says, suffuse through her like candlelight in a darkened room, not much practical help but comforting to have all the same.
#20 - Talent
He’s a man of few talents-a half-decent cook, an above average marksman, an okay guy to have as your third player in a game of pick-up basketball-all perfectly pedestrian, all save one . . . at manipulating people for information Frederick Chambers could teach a master class; now, reviewing the daily feed of Doherty's interrogation, he finds himself wishing he weren't quite so good at this.
#21 - Silence
She’s been buying time with silence, spooling out the hours into days by remaining steadfast in her refusal to give them anything for fear of giving them the one thing they’re looking for, but when, on what she thinks is the third day, the silence is broken by a back-handed slap that snaps her head back like a pez-dispenser’s, she starts to worry that maybe her credit has run out.
#22 - Journey
He’s been telling himself he was tricked into this, led blithely down the garden path of good intentions and greater dreams, but that’s a lie; he went in with eyes wide open, each step deliberate and purposeful, each turn weighed and selected with care, ever onward, ever downward, until he’s finally wound his own labyrinthine path into hell, and just because he couldn’t recognize the destination, doesn’t mean he’s been blind to the journey.
#23 - Fire
“You have a crusader’s fire,” Jay once told her, kissing her long and hard in a way that said he approved, and he was right; she’s always been ruled by her passions, the beliefs, loves, loyalties that burn fierce and hot within her, complete and all-consuming, but when Chambers emerges from the shadows to come and sit across from her, they become nothing more than barely flickering embers compared to her hate.
#24 - Strength
“They didn’t think you would last quite so long,” he murmurs almost casually as he sets the cup down in front of her so she can reach it with her bound hands, satisfied to see the flash of defiance in eyes that never leave him, even as she gulps greedily at the water, pleased to know that he, at least, has not miscalculated her strength.
#25 - Mask
Ninety-five percent of the time, Kim’s certain she’s finally meeting the real Chambers, the monstrous visage behind the mask and she works at memorizing every feature, determined never to be fooled again, but the other five percent, the fleeting seconds when he allows their gazes to connect, when she can bring herself to meet his eyes, she wonders if this is simply another façade, if even Chambers doesn’t know what he looks like anymore.
#26 - Ice
Her quiet ‘I trusted you’ is enough to thaw even the iciest of hearts, and before he can stop himself, he looks up; “I know.”
#27 - Fall
She thinks this is what it’s like to fall, to tumble headfirst, uncontrolled, unprotected, and even though you knows there’s only one way this ends, that you’ll end up shattered, a wrecked unrecognizable mass when you finally hit the ground, for the briefest of eternities it almost feels like flight.
#28 - Forgotten
He’d forgotten how this feels, this wanting, needing something purer, better than yourself, forgotten how trust can make you want to be truthful, how someone else’s belief in your goodness can make you wish it was really there, and for a moment you forget that its not.
#29 - Dance
She feels the shift, how the interrogations change in rhythm, tempo, tone, how the questioning becomes more brutal, even as his eyes connect with hers for longer periods of time, but its so subtle, that she doesn’t recognize it for what it is-a carefully choreographed dance-until the moment when he steps to the door, just out of the line of the video feed and asks, “Have you ever heard of Ockham’s razor?”
#30 - Body
Wallace drops with a single point blank shot, and when he comes running back inside, blood starting to seep through his left shirtsleeve, Ramirez doesn’t question his orders, doesn’t realize anything’s wrong until perhaps a second before his body hits the ground.
#31 - Sacred
As a Catholic she’d been taught all life was sacred, taught that murder was evil, unredeemable and without excuse, but as Chambers looks at her from the doorway, the guard who slapped her still bleeding out at his feet, all she can do is thank God.
#32 - Farewells
He keeps them moving, all his training, FBI and otherwise, kicking in, so that he’s functioning almost on auto-pilot as he strips the guards of their guns, ditches his phone, and hauls Doherty to a tan Camry that he figures won’t get reported for at least another five hours; by seven a.m. they’re a hundred miles outside the city, neither looking back once, and he realizes she has nothing more to say farewell to than he does.
#33 - World
She tells herself she’s looking for the perfect moment to escape, that she’ll run the second the right opportunity presents itself, but when she comes back from the gas station bathroom to find him half-unconscious from blood loss and pain, and her first instinct is to move him to the other seat and keep driving, she has to face the cruel reality that he’s become her world.
#34 - Formal
Hand still on the ignition key, head bent over the steering wheel, she mutters, so softly that he barely catches it, “I don’t even know what to call you,” and because he can’t bear to hear his first name on her lips, the empty familiarity for a man who doesn’t exist, who hasn’t existed for years, he gives her the only response he can: “Chambers will be fine Miss Doherty.”
#35 - Fever
Their moments of connection come and go like the fever dreams that continue to plague Chambers, more frequent with each passing day, the dangerous symptom of a growing infection.
#36 - Laugh
“You’re getting better,” Kim pronounces, sounding so pissed at this turn of events that he can’t help but laugh, a strained half-chuckle, half-groan, almost unrecognizable for what it is, but then it’s been so long he’s surprised he remembers how to laugh at all.
#37 - Lies
He never apologizes for the lies, never explains himself, or asks forgiveness; she appreciates the honesty in that.
#38 - Forever
She starts to learn how he takes his coffee, and he knows what music to find on the radio, and they never say the words ‘boyfriend’ or ‘Traveler’ or ‘Drexler’, and it begins to feel precariously like forever.
#39 - Overwhelmed
It happens because it has to, because the push pull of hating him and needing him is killing her, fracturing her beyond recognition, and it has to stop, something has to give; she thinks Chambers must understand, must have known it would come to this because as she holds the gun to his chest, begging for one good reason not to pull the trigger, he doesn’t look surprised or scared or angry, merely resigned: “I’m not worth your guilt.”
#40 - Whisper
It’s somehow fitting that the embrace comes on the precipice of death and murder, that as he reaches to draw the gun away from him and out of her hand, it simultaneously moves her nearer until she’s pressed up against him, shaking and crying, fists at his chest, lips on his neck, two words whispered over and over in both curse and confession-“Damn you.”
#41 - Wait
She feels as though they’ve been moving to this point since the beginning, that every step they’ve taken, every choice they’ve made, since the Drexler, since perhaps even before was always leading to this, and yet now that they’re here, now with the inevitable on the verge of happening, she finds herself suddenly suspended waiting in the no man’s land of his embrace for some sign that he’s felt it too.
#42 - Talk
He thinks Hometown should have recruited Kim Doherty long ago, for as he stands here, not-quite holding her, not-quite loving her, he wants to tell her things, make a full confession, whisper his worst deeds against her skin and discover if absolution can really be granted to anyone, and he has to stop himself, has to find her lips with his own before he can be made to talk.
#43 - Search
It becomes a quest, mapping him, learning his body, lips at his collarbone, fingers over scars-two in the back, one (hers) in the arm; she wants to unravel him, take her personal revenge by wrenching away his ever-present control until he’s just as vulnerable and adrift as he’s somehow made her, but more than anything she’s trying to find him and until she does she can’t seem to stop.
#44 - Hope
He knows he’s losing his edge, watching her sleep, teaching her to shoot, letting the idea of her seduce him into wanting more than he can have, but he doesn’t realize how far he’s fallen until she finally lets slip exactly how much she does know about Hometown; only then, on its deathbed, does he recognize his hope.
#45 - Eclipse
She knows the moment it happens, feels it in the darkness that settles over them, blotting out what little light that remained in her life, and though she didn’t think she had anything in her left to hurt, this betrayal eclipses all other wounds.
#46 - Gravity
The pull of Hometown is unalterable, his own personal force of nature, and he tells himself that he always knew it would happen this way, that you can only fly so long before gravity brings you crashing to the ground
#47 - Highway
The mile-markers become death-knells, each one mocking her, flitting by so fast she can barely keep track, but she forces herself to do so anyway, calling out the numbers in a kind of morbid count-down, until she thinks he might gag her out of desperation.
#48 - Unknown
In the end its not guilt or morality or anything so beautifully noble that makes him jerk the car sharply off the highway somewhere near Vancouver, but one simple selfish fact-there’s no one else and he doesn’t want to die unknown.
#49 - Lock
She doesn’t look at him as he slides the key into the lock on the handcuffs, doesn’t thank him or curse him, or hit him or hold him, or do any of the other ten-thousand things she will do to him in her mind from now until she’s dead be that five days or fifty years; she simply leaves, never looking back, never asking why because it doesn’t matter, because she isn’t really free.
#50 - Breathe
He dies in that moment, but because the world is cruel, he goes on, goes back to Hometown, pays his penance, and starts again at the work he is far too good at, proving by his very existence that just because someone breathes it doesn’t mean they’re alive.
Before they started dating, she’d waited three weeks for Jay to call her, even as she told herself she wasn’t that type of girl; now, staring at her cell after Tyler’s abrupt hang up, she mentally counts out two months, and wonders if she’ll ever stop waiting for the phone to ring.
#02 - Hero
They called him a hero, pinned a medal to his chest and slapped him on the back so hard that it’s not until years later, standing in his office, watching the clock and waiting for the call about the Drexler he knows is coming, when he finally feels the strings.
#03 - Memory
She’s certain of Jay’s innocence, but when the clarity of her belief is challenged by his own, she’s ashamed to find herself combing her memory for signs that she might be wrong.
#04 - Box
He knows she’s going to be trouble the moment they lose the trace on Burchell’s call, and every instinct tells him to arrest her here and now, get her cleanly out of the way, but he can’t stand the thought of putting her in a box.
#05 - Run
When he looks at her, really looks at her, her mind whispers one word, ‘run’, but it’s too late and she’s already ensnared.
#06 - Hurricane
The apartment looks as though a gale force wind has come through-drawers pulled out, clothing strewn everywhere, most of it for visual impact, exactly as he wanted-but she’s barely moved by the destruction, calm as the eye of a storm, and he can’t help his admiration.
#07 - Wings
After being released from jail, she starts to think of Chambers as her ally, a dark-suited, starched-shirt guardian angel, and she has to remind herself over and over that even Lucifer once had wings.
#08 - Cold
He knows he’s a cold man; he’s been chastised for it by his ex-wife, praised for it by Freed, but it’s never bothered him until Doherty looks at him like she’d expected something else.
#09 - Red
The monotony her parent’s life never hit her until now, when she thinks she might suffocate under its weight, and she jumps at the red message light on her cell-phone, listening with vague disappointment as her best girlfriend prattles on with stilted apologies and hollow promises, only realizing after the voicemail is over that she’d been hoping for him.
#10 - Drink
Two fingers of Glenlivet, no more, no less, he’s never had a drink during an investigation before, but then . . . everything about this time is different.
#11 - Midnight
The hour she and Jay have together is heaven, everything else fading away beneath the heat of his touch, the feel of his lips on her skin; for that hour things are simple and she loves him just as much as she ever has, but the clock strikes midnight, the fairytale ends, and the only thing she knows anymore is she’ll help him.
#12 - Temptation
He’s accepted the fact that he might have to kill Marlow, but he’s never wanted to, not until she has the audacity to go to Doherty and dangle before her the temptation of hope.
#13 - View
From the balcony of the club, she watches as Jay meets with Marlow, watches as his carefully laid plan goes to hell, until she can no longer afford to be a spectator, to let her life be decided without her input, and she acts.
#14 - Music
Even as she’s led out of the club in handcuffs, her eyes find his, gaze half-defiant, half-scared, and the moment is enough to tell him what he needs to know-she’s chosen her tune; she’ll have to pay the piper.
#15 - Silk
He's been treating her like silk, something delicate to be handled just so, lest it be ruined forever, but as he sends the chair skittering across the floor of the interview room, she sets her jaw, and gets ready to prove she's just as strong as silk, too.
#16 - Cover
Doherty’s body slams into the wall with more force than necessary as the agents cuff her, do what he refuses to do himself; if anyone comments on the fact that the SAC has grown too good to make his own arrests, well . . . years with Hometown have taught him to cover his weaknesses at any cost.
#17 - Promise
Over eight hours later, as she rubs at her steel-bitten wrists, wincing at the pain and her own naïve sense of betrayal, she still can’t find the moment in her memory when Chambers promised to protect her, and she doesn’t know why she thought he had.
#18 - Dream
Borjes comes to him that night, sits on down with a glass of the Glenlivet, and begins to converse like they’re the good friends they never were in life, the congenial atmosphere only marred by the still bleeding gunshot wound, and though it haunts him longer than any previous nightmare, like all his dreams it fades eventually.
#19 - Candle
"Where. Is. Agent. Chambers?" she asks, enunciating each word slowly, mockingly, letting the perverse pleasure at the interrogators scowl at her words, the only ones she ever says, suffuse through her like candlelight in a darkened room, not much practical help but comforting to have all the same.
#20 - Talent
He’s a man of few talents-a half-decent cook, an above average marksman, an okay guy to have as your third player in a game of pick-up basketball-all perfectly pedestrian, all save one . . . at manipulating people for information Frederick Chambers could teach a master class; now, reviewing the daily feed of Doherty's interrogation, he finds himself wishing he weren't quite so good at this.
#21 - Silence
She’s been buying time with silence, spooling out the hours into days by remaining steadfast in her refusal to give them anything for fear of giving them the one thing they’re looking for, but when, on what she thinks is the third day, the silence is broken by a back-handed slap that snaps her head back like a pez-dispenser’s, she starts to worry that maybe her credit has run out.
#22 - Journey
He’s been telling himself he was tricked into this, led blithely down the garden path of good intentions and greater dreams, but that’s a lie; he went in with eyes wide open, each step deliberate and purposeful, each turn weighed and selected with care, ever onward, ever downward, until he’s finally wound his own labyrinthine path into hell, and just because he couldn’t recognize the destination, doesn’t mean he’s been blind to the journey.
#23 - Fire
“You have a crusader’s fire,” Jay once told her, kissing her long and hard in a way that said he approved, and he was right; she’s always been ruled by her passions, the beliefs, loves, loyalties that burn fierce and hot within her, complete and all-consuming, but when Chambers emerges from the shadows to come and sit across from her, they become nothing more than barely flickering embers compared to her hate.
#24 - Strength
“They didn’t think you would last quite so long,” he murmurs almost casually as he sets the cup down in front of her so she can reach it with her bound hands, satisfied to see the flash of defiance in eyes that never leave him, even as she gulps greedily at the water, pleased to know that he, at least, has not miscalculated her strength.
#25 - Mask
Ninety-five percent of the time, Kim’s certain she’s finally meeting the real Chambers, the monstrous visage behind the mask and she works at memorizing every feature, determined never to be fooled again, but the other five percent, the fleeting seconds when he allows their gazes to connect, when she can bring herself to meet his eyes, she wonders if this is simply another façade, if even Chambers doesn’t know what he looks like anymore.
#26 - Ice
Her quiet ‘I trusted you’ is enough to thaw even the iciest of hearts, and before he can stop himself, he looks up; “I know.”
#27 - Fall
She thinks this is what it’s like to fall, to tumble headfirst, uncontrolled, unprotected, and even though you knows there’s only one way this ends, that you’ll end up shattered, a wrecked unrecognizable mass when you finally hit the ground, for the briefest of eternities it almost feels like flight.
#28 - Forgotten
He’d forgotten how this feels, this wanting, needing something purer, better than yourself, forgotten how trust can make you want to be truthful, how someone else’s belief in your goodness can make you wish it was really there, and for a moment you forget that its not.
#29 - Dance
She feels the shift, how the interrogations change in rhythm, tempo, tone, how the questioning becomes more brutal, even as his eyes connect with hers for longer periods of time, but its so subtle, that she doesn’t recognize it for what it is-a carefully choreographed dance-until the moment when he steps to the door, just out of the line of the video feed and asks, “Have you ever heard of Ockham’s razor?”
#30 - Body
Wallace drops with a single point blank shot, and when he comes running back inside, blood starting to seep through his left shirtsleeve, Ramirez doesn’t question his orders, doesn’t realize anything’s wrong until perhaps a second before his body hits the ground.
#31 - Sacred
As a Catholic she’d been taught all life was sacred, taught that murder was evil, unredeemable and without excuse, but as Chambers looks at her from the doorway, the guard who slapped her still bleeding out at his feet, all she can do is thank God.
#32 - Farewells
He keeps them moving, all his training, FBI and otherwise, kicking in, so that he’s functioning almost on auto-pilot as he strips the guards of their guns, ditches his phone, and hauls Doherty to a tan Camry that he figures won’t get reported for at least another five hours; by seven a.m. they’re a hundred miles outside the city, neither looking back once, and he realizes she has nothing more to say farewell to than he does.
#33 - World
She tells herself she’s looking for the perfect moment to escape, that she’ll run the second the right opportunity presents itself, but when she comes back from the gas station bathroom to find him half-unconscious from blood loss and pain, and her first instinct is to move him to the other seat and keep driving, she has to face the cruel reality that he’s become her world.
#34 - Formal
Hand still on the ignition key, head bent over the steering wheel, she mutters, so softly that he barely catches it, “I don’t even know what to call you,” and because he can’t bear to hear his first name on her lips, the empty familiarity for a man who doesn’t exist, who hasn’t existed for years, he gives her the only response he can: “Chambers will be fine Miss Doherty.”
#35 - Fever
Their moments of connection come and go like the fever dreams that continue to plague Chambers, more frequent with each passing day, the dangerous symptom of a growing infection.
#36 - Laugh
“You’re getting better,” Kim pronounces, sounding so pissed at this turn of events that he can’t help but laugh, a strained half-chuckle, half-groan, almost unrecognizable for what it is, but then it’s been so long he’s surprised he remembers how to laugh at all.
#37 - Lies
He never apologizes for the lies, never explains himself, or asks forgiveness; she appreciates the honesty in that.
#38 - Forever
She starts to learn how he takes his coffee, and he knows what music to find on the radio, and they never say the words ‘boyfriend’ or ‘Traveler’ or ‘Drexler’, and it begins to feel precariously like forever.
#39 - Overwhelmed
It happens because it has to, because the push pull of hating him and needing him is killing her, fracturing her beyond recognition, and it has to stop, something has to give; she thinks Chambers must understand, must have known it would come to this because as she holds the gun to his chest, begging for one good reason not to pull the trigger, he doesn’t look surprised or scared or angry, merely resigned: “I’m not worth your guilt.”
#40 - Whisper
It’s somehow fitting that the embrace comes on the precipice of death and murder, that as he reaches to draw the gun away from him and out of her hand, it simultaneously moves her nearer until she’s pressed up against him, shaking and crying, fists at his chest, lips on his neck, two words whispered over and over in both curse and confession-“Damn you.”
#41 - Wait
She feels as though they’ve been moving to this point since the beginning, that every step they’ve taken, every choice they’ve made, since the Drexler, since perhaps even before was always leading to this, and yet now that they’re here, now with the inevitable on the verge of happening, she finds herself suddenly suspended waiting in the no man’s land of his embrace for some sign that he’s felt it too.
#42 - Talk
He thinks Hometown should have recruited Kim Doherty long ago, for as he stands here, not-quite holding her, not-quite loving her, he wants to tell her things, make a full confession, whisper his worst deeds against her skin and discover if absolution can really be granted to anyone, and he has to stop himself, has to find her lips with his own before he can be made to talk.
#43 - Search
It becomes a quest, mapping him, learning his body, lips at his collarbone, fingers over scars-two in the back, one (hers) in the arm; she wants to unravel him, take her personal revenge by wrenching away his ever-present control until he’s just as vulnerable and adrift as he’s somehow made her, but more than anything she’s trying to find him and until she does she can’t seem to stop.
#44 - Hope
He knows he’s losing his edge, watching her sleep, teaching her to shoot, letting the idea of her seduce him into wanting more than he can have, but he doesn’t realize how far he’s fallen until she finally lets slip exactly how much she does know about Hometown; only then, on its deathbed, does he recognize his hope.
#45 - Eclipse
She knows the moment it happens, feels it in the darkness that settles over them, blotting out what little light that remained in her life, and though she didn’t think she had anything in her left to hurt, this betrayal eclipses all other wounds.
#46 - Gravity
The pull of Hometown is unalterable, his own personal force of nature, and he tells himself that he always knew it would happen this way, that you can only fly so long before gravity brings you crashing to the ground
#47 - Highway
The mile-markers become death-knells, each one mocking her, flitting by so fast she can barely keep track, but she forces herself to do so anyway, calling out the numbers in a kind of morbid count-down, until she thinks he might gag her out of desperation.
#48 - Unknown
In the end its not guilt or morality or anything so beautifully noble that makes him jerk the car sharply off the highway somewhere near Vancouver, but one simple selfish fact-there’s no one else and he doesn’t want to die unknown.
#49 - Lock
She doesn’t look at him as he slides the key into the lock on the handcuffs, doesn’t thank him or curse him, or hit him or hold him, or do any of the other ten-thousand things she will do to him in her mind from now until she’s dead be that five days or fifty years; she simply leaves, never looking back, never asking why because it doesn’t matter, because she isn’t really free.
#50 - Breathe
He dies in that moment, but because the world is cruel, he goes on, goes back to Hometown, pays his penance, and starts again at the work he is far too good at, proving by his very existence that just because someone breathes it doesn’t mean they’re alive.