Later
Summary: Maine/Wash, after the war. Part III
A year and a half later:
"He's probably not even here."
"He'll be here," she said softly.
"How do you know?"
She shrugged and gave him a reassuring smile. He really hoped she was wrong, but at the same time hoped she was right. Maine pulled into the driveway, the car idling as he stared at the old pick-up truck.
"Maybe he finally got a new car."
"If you're not ready..."
He glanced over at her and squeezed her hand gently. "No, I... no. I need to do this."
Taking a deep breath, he finally got out of the car and waited for her to join him. She straightened his collar, kissed his cheek, then he walked with her to the door and knocked a few times.
A faint, "just a moment," came in reply, and Maine's stomach turned all sorts of knots as he waited.
The curtain at the window beside the door was drawn back, and then dropped. At first, Maine wondered if he wouldn't answer the door after all, and it did seem to take an awful long time before he finally heard the latch click and the door opened slowly.
Wash glanced between Maine and the girl, who Wash immediately decided was far too young for him and he bristled slightly at how she gripped his hand. What the hell was he doing getting together with someone half his age and further, what on earth had ever gotten into his head to bring her out here and-
"Hey."
Wash gave a barely perceptible nod.
"I uh..." Maine found that all the words he had practiced on the five hour trip here, not to mention the week of preparation for the trip, and the months of internal fighting before that, had fled completely from his brain.
Wash, for all he wanted to slam the door in his face and never think of him again, stood aside. "Would you like to come in?"
It felt odd to walk as a guest through the door that had once been his home. He kicked his shoes off as a matter of habit and waited until Wash lead them to the living room. Wash sat in the chair and motioned for his guests to take the couch.
"Can I get you anything?" Wash was trying to use hospitality to hide from the nausea that was threatening to overtake him. It wasn't working terribly well.
"No, thank you," the woman - girl really - said with a gentle smile. She seemed to understand how awkward this must be, and Wash wondered about that, but his thoughts were interrupted.
"David, I... I'd like to introduce you to Samantha."
"A pleasure, Samantha," Wash forced, leaning forward to shake her hand briefly.
"Call me Sam. Nice to meet you," she said, sounding genuinely pleased but a little reserved on account of the situation. "I've heard a lot about you."
'Funny, I haven't heard a thing about you, or from him, until you both show up at my door. If this is your way of saying you've moved on, then... bad form, Maine. Really fuckin- I mean my god, she can't even be eighteen! There's no way! What is this, your mid-life crisis? Did you buy a Porsche, too?'
"She's..." Maine looked decidedly uncomfortable under Wash's gaze. "She's my daughter, Wash."
"Look, I don't- wait, what?" Wash's entire mental processes came to a grinding halt as he tried desperately to switch gears and adjust to this new bit of information. 'I heard that wrong. I know I heard that wrong.'
"I, uh... I found out about a year ago. After we..." He dropped his eyes and swallowed. "After I went back east."
Wash tried to do some quick mental math, and Maine sighed.
"Just before I joined up, I met this girl and we..." he tried to explain, answering the question he knew was in Wash's head. "And, well.. here we are. Fourteen years later."
"My god, you have a fourteen year old daughter?" he breathed. And then he could see it. The angle of her jaw, and the line of her mouth, the colour of her eyes...
"Well, thirteen."
Wash dropped his head, rubbing his brow. A million questions were going through his mind right now and he needed to figure out which one he should ask first. Where's her mother? Are you with her, then? Gone off to raise a happy little family? Why are you here, why are you doing this?
Maine waited for a moment, then took advantage of the silence. "I hoped... we might talk?"
Wash thought about that question for an agonizing amount of time, it seemed, before he finally nodded and stood up.
"You need anything?" Maine asked, and Sam shook her head.
"No, I'll be fine."
Maine followed Wash out the back door to sit on the porch. It was early evening, and Maine couldn't help but feel all the old memories return of their nights sitting out here until the sun had disappeared, holding hands and talking about their day. They used to talk in the beginning, back before everything had turned to a fight.
Wash started. "Why are you here?" He had so many conflicting emotions in him, so many things he wanted to say - that he had wanted to say for the last fourteen months.
"We were in the area and... I thought..." Damn, this was harder than he had thought it would be. He rubbed his face and tried desperately to remember anything of his practiced speeches. "I'm sorry, I guess... I guess I should have called first or... something." Maine shrugged.
"Yeah."
'Knew this was a bad idea. Great.'
Wash didn't really believe that they had just 'happened' to be in the area. Not way out here, not for a minute. "Where are you headed?"
Maine drug his eyes away from the scene that had once been so familiar to him, that still was, and looked at Wash. "I'm taking Sam up to Seattle. To the Children's Hospital."
Wash grew very still, his chest clenching. When he finally spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. "What's wrong with her?"
Maine shook his head a little. "They're not really sure. Some sort of leukemia they think. They're going to be starting her on a bunch of tests..." he trailed off, then shrugged.
"I'm sorry," Wash murmured after a while.
Maine nodded, then stared down at the ground. "I uh... there's a chance if... if it's the worst case, that she won't be leaving the hospital much, once she's in."
Wash stayed silent, but couldn't help but think that there was something more going on here.
Eventually, Maine continued. "And I wanted her to meet you. While she still could." He tried to say more, opened his mouth a few times, but finally gave up. He didn't know how to say what he was thinking, and he didn't even know himself what he was feeling.
Wash steadied himself, taking a moment to find his voice again. "Why did you want her to meet me?" he asked, though it seemed a strange question. Still, it was one he needed to hear the answer to.
Maine's courage was failing him. Even after the years they had been together, Wash still could lapse into that damned unreadable expression and leave Maine groping in the dark to try to figure out what was going on in his head.
The truth was, he couldn't really give an answer to that question, not without about five pages of exposition first. He wanted to be in Wash's life again, wanted Wash in his. Even if they couldn't go back to being lovers, maybe they could at least be... old war buddies? Oh fuck, how lame did that sound. He wanted to stay connected to him, even if he could only linger on the very periphery of his life. He was afraid to lose him forever, more afraid that he already had.
That brought him to thinking of his mother, how he had felt so guilty that in the year they'd been home he had never once gone to see her, and then she had died and he never got to tell her he loved her one last time. He had never got to introduce the man he loved to her.
And then the day he had received the terrifying revelation that he had a daughter, eleven at the time, who was going to be put into foster care because her mother was determined to be unfit after her latest convictions. Drugs and prostitution. So Maine found himself quite an unexpected father of an angry pre-teen who, for reasons he still couldn't explain, seemed to latch onto him. And he, in turn, had found the one thread of family he could still hang on to.
And now here he was, taking his daughter to what may very well be the last place she'll ever be, and he couldn't risk the chance that Wash might never know her, might never know the bright, beautiful young girl that he still could not believe came from him. She had even been the one who convinced him to try.
"I've missed you."
At first Maine wasn't sure if he'd really heard him or just wanted to hear it so bad he'd imagined it. He looked up to find Wash looking intently at him.
Wash had waited patiently as Maine had been consumed with whatever thoughts were in his head, but finally he couldn't stay quiet any more. "I kept... kept hoping that you'd come back... or call, write. Anything."
Maine's face contorted as he tried to prevent the tears he felt rising.
"I don't know if you've met someone or..." he said, his own voice heavy with the tears he was preventing.
Maine just dumbly shook his head 'no'. He had been prepared for anything except this. He had been prepared for Wash to slam the door in his face. He had been prepared to be told never to come back. He had even entertained the remote possibility that Wash would talk to him and agree that maybe, just maybe, they could think about staying in touch. He had never expected this.
Wash, for all he was usually able to read Maine's moods, mistook his silence for reluctance. "I know things were... got really hard between us for a while, but I- maybe we could-"
"I never..." Maine choked and fought but couldn't deny his tears this time. "I never thought you'd want me back."
Wash looked at him, really looked at him, and finally understood what Maine was trying to tell him.
"It isn't home without you here," Wash said. Tentatively, he reached out, meeting no resistance as he slipped his arms around Maine, and then felt Maine hold him in return. "I want you home, Maine," he mumbled into his shoulder. "Please come home."
Twelve hours later:
They had set Sam up on the couch for the night, and then they had gone to talk. There was a lot to cover. And the more they talked, they more they found the old fights just weren't there anymore. None of it seemed important any longer, not after they had realized exactly what they had lost to foolish pride and misplaced anger.
Maine had finally fallen asleep, having already been at the brink of exhaustion when they arrived. Wash had sat quietly beside him for a while, stroked his hair and watching as the sky outside the windows slowly faded from black to deep blue and finally tinged with a hint of orange as one by one the stars winked out of existence. After slipping a t-shirt and robe on over his pajama bottoms, Wash went to the kitchen to make a pot of much-needed coffee. He tried to be quiet so as not to disturb Sam, but when he got to the main room she was already awake.
"Morning," she called out softly. He glanced over and saw she was curled up with a book. "I hope you don't mind," she said, lifting it slightly to indicate what she meant.
"Hey there," he said, coming over to sit in the chair beside her. "No, I don't mind."
"Where's dad?"
"He's sleeping," Wash replied.
She closed the book, using her finger so as not to lose her place, and turned a bit more to face him, tucking her legs beneath her. "So, are you getting back together?"
Wash really didn't know what to say. He didn't talk about things like this, certainly not with thirteen-year-old girls! God, Maine's daughter? He was still trying to really process that. "Yeah, I think so," he finally said.
"That's good," she said, nodding to herself. "You seem really cool. I think Dad has better taste in men than in women."
He blushed just a touch. This was getting very awkward, and he wasn't used to meeting people who were so open and accepting of this.
"I think he really needs you," she added.
While her words were reassuring on many levels, Wash was not prepared to have this kind of discussion with the newly met teen-aged daughter of his lover. His eyes glanced down at the book, desperate for a change of subject. "What are you reading there?"
She held the cover up for him to see, a collection of old poems, and his breath caught. It was one of the many books he used to read to Maine in the quiet evening hours. That was almost more than he could handle right now and he slowly got up from the chair. "I'm going to make some coffee," he said, and Sam perked up.
"I can cook us breakfast, if you want," she offered with a grin. "Dad taught me how to make pancakes."
Wash just stopped and stared at her. "He... he cooks?"
She laughed quietly. "He said you'd never believe it."
A year and a half later:
"He's probably not even here."
"He'll be here," she said softly.
"How do you know?"
She shrugged and gave him a reassuring smile. He really hoped she was wrong, but at the same time hoped she was right. Maine pulled into the driveway, the car idling as he stared at the old pick-up truck.
"Maybe he finally got a new car."
"If you're not ready..."
He glanced over at her and squeezed her hand gently. "No, I... no. I need to do this."
Taking a deep breath, he finally got out of the car and waited for her to join him. She straightened his collar, kissed his cheek, then he walked with her to the door and knocked a few times.
A faint, "just a moment," came in reply, and Maine's stomach turned all sorts of knots as he waited.
The curtain at the window beside the door was drawn back, and then dropped. At first, Maine wondered if he wouldn't answer the door after all, and it did seem to take an awful long time before he finally heard the latch click and the door opened slowly.
Wash glanced between Maine and the girl, who Wash immediately decided was far too young for him and he bristled slightly at how she gripped his hand. What the hell was he doing getting together with someone half his age and further, what on earth had ever gotten into his head to bring her out here and-
"Hey."
Wash gave a barely perceptible nod.
"I uh..." Maine found that all the words he had practiced on the five hour trip here, not to mention the week of preparation for the trip, and the months of internal fighting before that, had fled completely from his brain.
Wash, for all he wanted to slam the door in his face and never think of him again, stood aside. "Would you like to come in?"
It felt odd to walk as a guest through the door that had once been his home. He kicked his shoes off as a matter of habit and waited until Wash lead them to the living room. Wash sat in the chair and motioned for his guests to take the couch.
"Can I get you anything?" Wash was trying to use hospitality to hide from the nausea that was threatening to overtake him. It wasn't working terribly well.
"No, thank you," the woman - girl really - said with a gentle smile. She seemed to understand how awkward this must be, and Wash wondered about that, but his thoughts were interrupted.
"David, I... I'd like to introduce you to Samantha."
"A pleasure, Samantha," Wash forced, leaning forward to shake her hand briefly.
"Call me Sam. Nice to meet you," she said, sounding genuinely pleased but a little reserved on account of the situation. "I've heard a lot about you."
'Funny, I haven't heard a thing about you, or from him, until you both show up at my door. If this is your way of saying you've moved on, then... bad form, Maine. Really fuckin- I mean my god, she can't even be eighteen! There's no way! What is this, your mid-life crisis? Did you buy a Porsche, too?'
"She's..." Maine looked decidedly uncomfortable under Wash's gaze. "She's my daughter, Wash."
"Look, I don't- wait, what?" Wash's entire mental processes came to a grinding halt as he tried desperately to switch gears and adjust to this new bit of information. 'I heard that wrong. I know I heard that wrong.'
"I, uh... I found out about a year ago. After we..." He dropped his eyes and swallowed. "After I went back east."
Wash tried to do some quick mental math, and Maine sighed.
"Just before I joined up, I met this girl and we..." he tried to explain, answering the question he knew was in Wash's head. "And, well.. here we are. Fourteen years later."
"My god, you have a fourteen year old daughter?" he breathed. And then he could see it. The angle of her jaw, and the line of her mouth, the colour of her eyes...
"Well, thirteen."
Wash dropped his head, rubbing his brow. A million questions were going through his mind right now and he needed to figure out which one he should ask first. Where's her mother? Are you with her, then? Gone off to raise a happy little family? Why are you here, why are you doing this?
Maine waited for a moment, then took advantage of the silence. "I hoped... we might talk?"
Wash thought about that question for an agonizing amount of time, it seemed, before he finally nodded and stood up.
"You need anything?" Maine asked, and Sam shook her head.
"No, I'll be fine."
Maine followed Wash out the back door to sit on the porch. It was early evening, and Maine couldn't help but feel all the old memories return of their nights sitting out here until the sun had disappeared, holding hands and talking about their day. They used to talk in the beginning, back before everything had turned to a fight.
Wash started. "Why are you here?" He had so many conflicting emotions in him, so many things he wanted to say - that he had wanted to say for the last fourteen months.
"We were in the area and... I thought..." Damn, this was harder than he had thought it would be. He rubbed his face and tried desperately to remember anything of his practiced speeches. "I'm sorry, I guess... I guess I should have called first or... something." Maine shrugged.
"Yeah."
'Knew this was a bad idea. Great.'
Wash didn't really believe that they had just 'happened' to be in the area. Not way out here, not for a minute. "Where are you headed?"
Maine drug his eyes away from the scene that had once been so familiar to him, that still was, and looked at Wash. "I'm taking Sam up to Seattle. To the Children's Hospital."
Wash grew very still, his chest clenching. When he finally spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. "What's wrong with her?"
Maine shook his head a little. "They're not really sure. Some sort of leukemia they think. They're going to be starting her on a bunch of tests..." he trailed off, then shrugged.
"I'm sorry," Wash murmured after a while.
Maine nodded, then stared down at the ground. "I uh... there's a chance if... if it's the worst case, that she won't be leaving the hospital much, once she's in."
Wash stayed silent, but couldn't help but think that there was something more going on here.
Eventually, Maine continued. "And I wanted her to meet you. While she still could." He tried to say more, opened his mouth a few times, but finally gave up. He didn't know how to say what he was thinking, and he didn't even know himself what he was feeling.
Wash steadied himself, taking a moment to find his voice again. "Why did you want her to meet me?" he asked, though it seemed a strange question. Still, it was one he needed to hear the answer to.
Maine's courage was failing him. Even after the years they had been together, Wash still could lapse into that damned unreadable expression and leave Maine groping in the dark to try to figure out what was going on in his head.
The truth was, he couldn't really give an answer to that question, not without about five pages of exposition first. He wanted to be in Wash's life again, wanted Wash in his. Even if they couldn't go back to being lovers, maybe they could at least be... old war buddies? Oh fuck, how lame did that sound. He wanted to stay connected to him, even if he could only linger on the very periphery of his life. He was afraid to lose him forever, more afraid that he already had.
That brought him to thinking of his mother, how he had felt so guilty that in the year they'd been home he had never once gone to see her, and then she had died and he never got to tell her he loved her one last time. He had never got to introduce the man he loved to her.
And then the day he had received the terrifying revelation that he had a daughter, eleven at the time, who was going to be put into foster care because her mother was determined to be unfit after her latest convictions. Drugs and prostitution. So Maine found himself quite an unexpected father of an angry pre-teen who, for reasons he still couldn't explain, seemed to latch onto him. And he, in turn, had found the one thread of family he could still hang on to.
And now here he was, taking his daughter to what may very well be the last place she'll ever be, and he couldn't risk the chance that Wash might never know her, might never know the bright, beautiful young girl that he still could not believe came from him. She had even been the one who convinced him to try.
"I've missed you."
At first Maine wasn't sure if he'd really heard him or just wanted to hear it so bad he'd imagined it. He looked up to find Wash looking intently at him.
Wash had waited patiently as Maine had been consumed with whatever thoughts were in his head, but finally he couldn't stay quiet any more. "I kept... kept hoping that you'd come back... or call, write. Anything."
Maine's face contorted as he tried to prevent the tears he felt rising.
"I don't know if you've met someone or..." he said, his own voice heavy with the tears he was preventing.
Maine just dumbly shook his head 'no'. He had been prepared for anything except this. He had been prepared for Wash to slam the door in his face. He had been prepared to be told never to come back. He had even entertained the remote possibility that Wash would talk to him and agree that maybe, just maybe, they could think about staying in touch. He had never expected this.
Wash, for all he was usually able to read Maine's moods, mistook his silence for reluctance. "I know things were... got really hard between us for a while, but I- maybe we could-"
"I never..." Maine choked and fought but couldn't deny his tears this time. "I never thought you'd want me back."
Wash looked at him, really looked at him, and finally understood what Maine was trying to tell him.
"It isn't home without you here," Wash said. Tentatively, he reached out, meeting no resistance as he slipped his arms around Maine, and then felt Maine hold him in return. "I want you home, Maine," he mumbled into his shoulder. "Please come home."
Twelve hours later:
They had set Sam up on the couch for the night, and then they had gone to talk. There was a lot to cover. And the more they talked, they more they found the old fights just weren't there anymore. None of it seemed important any longer, not after they had realized exactly what they had lost to foolish pride and misplaced anger.
Maine had finally fallen asleep, having already been at the brink of exhaustion when they arrived. Wash had sat quietly beside him for a while, stroked his hair and watching as the sky outside the windows slowly faded from black to deep blue and finally tinged with a hint of orange as one by one the stars winked out of existence. After slipping a t-shirt and robe on over his pajama bottoms, Wash went to the kitchen to make a pot of much-needed coffee. He tried to be quiet so as not to disturb Sam, but when he got to the main room she was already awake.
"Morning," she called out softly. He glanced over and saw she was curled up with a book. "I hope you don't mind," she said, lifting it slightly to indicate what she meant.
"Hey there," he said, coming over to sit in the chair beside her. "No, I don't mind."
"Where's dad?"
"He's sleeping," Wash replied.
She closed the book, using her finger so as not to lose her place, and turned a bit more to face him, tucking her legs beneath her. "So, are you getting back together?"
Wash really didn't know what to say. He didn't talk about things like this, certainly not with thirteen-year-old girls! God, Maine's daughter? He was still trying to really process that. "Yeah, I think so," he finally said.
"That's good," she said, nodding to herself. "You seem really cool. I think Dad has better taste in men than in women."
He blushed just a touch. This was getting very awkward, and he wasn't used to meeting people who were so open and accepting of this.
"I think he really needs you," she added.
While her words were reassuring on many levels, Wash was not prepared to have this kind of discussion with the newly met teen-aged daughter of his lover. His eyes glanced down at the book, desperate for a change of subject. "What are you reading there?"
She held the cover up for him to see, a collection of old poems, and his breath caught. It was one of the many books he used to read to Maine in the quiet evening hours. That was almost more than he could handle right now and he slowly got up from the chair. "I'm going to make some coffee," he said, and Sam perked up.
"I can cook us breakfast, if you want," she offered with a grin. "Dad taught me how to make pancakes."
Wash just stopped and stared at her. "He... he cooks?"
She laughed quietly. "He said you'd never believe it."