Fic: The Life You Save/4
Title: The Life You Save
Author: Scribere Est Agere
Pairing: Goren/Eames
Spoilers: After Purgatory
Rating: M
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me.
Summary: May be your own.
//
I know the darkness pulls on you
But it’s just a point of view
When you’re outside looking in
You belong to someone
~ Brandi Carlile, Looking Out
//
He floats for some time in a drug-induced haze in a world that has no colour, but is all colours, at once. Odd, but not overly distressing. There is light and sound, but he can’t make sense of any of it (random clanks and clicks and slaps and slams and unfamiliar voices allinajumble sometimes slow sometimes reallyfast), and every time he tries to sort it out, he remembers he really doesn’t want to do that, so he simply stops, and lets himself float again. It’s so easy, to just let go, and all in all, not really a bad way to pass the time now that-
No no. Let’s not think about that. Let’s think about this instead:
The word avocado comes from the Aztec word ahuacate, meaning testicle.
Fascinating, really, and really? He’ll never eat another avocado in his life.
Human sperm comes in three varieties: Some drive toward the egg, some exist only to kill, and some to obstruct other men’s sperm. The relative proportions found in semen depends on the man’s belief at the time of ejaculation about whether his are the only sperm there.
Another reason why he, himself, will never procreate, because he, himself, will always assume someone else (someone better) has gotten there first.
The largest Island in Canada is Baffin Island, the fifth biggest island on Earth. Only two US states are bigger than Baffin Island: Alaska and Texas. Baffin Island is more than double the size of the UK and slightly smaller than France.
Oh, Canada. He carries a Loonie in his pocket, received from the trusty Coin Of the Month Club, and he fully intends to use it, one day.
Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliaphobia is the fear of long words.
He’ll have to remember to tell Eames that one, just to see her roll her eyes and smile in that way she has when he’s said something both irritating and endearing and-
Oh. Ohgod. See where thinking gets you, Goren? Nowhere good, that’s where. The colourless colours swirl and churn and his stomach clenches and knots and as he leans over the side of his bed and heaves and heaves he realizes he really knows only one thing: that everyone he loves is dead or gone and Eames is dead and gone and really, nothing else matters anymore, not random useless facts, not colours, not his name or date of birth, not anything.
//
The day she is to be released, Ross appears in the doorway.
“You’re looking better,” he says. She only nods, struggling to adjust her hoodie over her sling. She know she looks like shit, but she’s polite, and she’s up and mobile and the pain is only mildly agonizing today, so, there’s that.
“Your father’s coming?”
“In about an hour. They want me to stay with my sister for a few days, but honestly, I’d get more rest at the precinct than at her house.”
Ross smiles. He’s waiting. She knows he’s waiting.
“And I’m seeing Bobby tomorrow. I have an appointment at 11 a.m. And even to do that, I had to use my menacing cop voice. And give my badge number. And your name as a reference.” She smoothes her hair down awkwardly. She needs a shower, a real shower, but lifting her good arm up with her ribs taped is…She sighs. Maybe she should stay with Liz after all.
“Eames. It’s not…a good idea.” Ross sighs. “He’s still…”
“I need to see him.” Her entire body aches and she’s so exhausted she might fall asleep standing up. “I need to...” She swallows. “He doesn’t belong there.”
Ross sighs again, leans against the door jamb. Alex’s hand is shaking. She shoves it into her pocket.
“I mean, don’t you agree? You can’t think…you don’t think he needs to be there.” She looks at him. He doesn’t answer. “Do you?”
He takes a few steps inside, reluctantly.
“Eames, you and I know…we both know, better than anyone, what he’s gone through the past few years. His mother. Frank. Nicole. Donny. Declan.” The names of the dead and departed ring loudly in the small room. All those losses, all that pain. “Any one of them might have been enough to push him past his breaking point. But then…you. You.”
She shakes her head.
(He’s going to need you, so you have to go back)
“Maybe you don’t want to hear it, but you mean more to Goren than anyone else in the world, and I’m talking even before he lost everyone else in his life. I stood next to him that day, watching him watch you, and I saw his face when Nagy-”
He stops and swallows.
“Something…something inside him changed. Do you understand? And he went running and he slammed that door open and grabbed Nagy and I couldn’t have stopped him if I tried, unless I’d used my gun.” He pauses. “And believe me, I considered it.”
(a man who has nothing left to lose is a man possessed is the most dangerous man in the world)
Eames shakes her head. “It doesn’t mean-”
“It might mean he does need a…rest. It might. He might be…better off in a facility that can…help him. Have you thought of that?”
“Actually, I haven’t.”
“You also haven’t even seen him yet.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“It might.”
“It won’t. There’s nothing wrong with him. He saved my life.” Don’t cry, Alex. Do not cry. “And now, it’s my turn to repay the favour.”
They stare at one another. Alex can hear her heart beating.
“Fine. Fine.” Ross takes another step closer. She can see, then, how utterly fatigued he looks and it hits her then what a toll all this has taken on him, too. He’s aged at least 10 years. “But do me a favour first, all right? Call your father…tell him to meet you at the precinct instead in a few hours.”
She looks at him.
“I need you to see something.”
//
Bobby counts ceiling tiles (159) until his eyes blur more than usual even, practices wiggling his fingers and toes, recalls interesting facts (a “jiffy” is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second), tries to convince himself that this place is better than Tates, because at least here he gets enough to drink and eat and the people looking after him are infinitely gentle with their touches and voices and it doesn’t smell too bad (Lysol and laundry detergent and steamed peas and urine), and whatever they’re giving him is the good shit because it mostly keeps the bad thoughts away and he sleeps for long periods of time without too many dreams, except for very occasionally when images slip in here and there and because he’s curious (he always was the most curious child his mother said so but his mother’s dead), he allows himself access to them, just to test himself, just to keep his mind agile, and besides, he gets to see Eames again and hear her voice, even if he knows none of it is real. Because Eames is dead, too.
He knows what’s real and what is not, because he’s not really crazy, until it comes to her, but this is real, what he remembers from that day-
//
It’s dark in the viewing room, and the flickering, grainy screen takes centre stage. Alex sits uneasily in front of the viewer, with Ross standing to her right, and Jim, the young, nervous tech guy (“You want to watch what?”), to her left. Ross was able to sneak her in without any of her colleagues seeing, thank god, because she knows she wouldn’t be able to say a single word to anyone, or hear a single word of sympathy, or see a single pitying look, without bursting into tears. So now, here she sits, and she really doesn’t want to watch, but she can’t look away, either. So long ago, it seems, another lifetime, how can it be less than two weeks, and she and Nagy sitting across from one another, long silver table between them. She looks incredibly small and defenseless. She wants to reach through the screen and grab herself by the shoulders, tell herself to run before it’s too late. But, it is too late, even now, because Nagy has leaned forward, and even from her vantage point through the screen, she can see his eyes go flat and dead, can see his fingers grip the table, can almost hear Bobby behind her-
//
-his hands flat against the window, pounding, pounding out a frantic warning to her, pounding hard enough, he thinks, to shatter the glass. He sees her shoulders go back, her whole body tense because she knows something has changed, that the real Nagy has emerged at last, and maybe she’s remembering his words of caution, too, and she knows how dangerous he is, she saw it herself on the girl in the morgue, so why isn’t she moving, why isn’t she running, because Bobby knows what’s coming even before it happens, before Nagy stands and grabs the chair and shoves it under the door handle and turns back to her-
//
-and slaps her hard and fast across the face as she’s reaching for her gun (too slow too fucking slow but I was so surprised I can’t be blamed I can’t) and she manages to kick him once, twice, which only infuriates him more, and he picks her up and throws her, and what surprises Alex is how fast it all happens, seconds, really, but she keeps it together as she watches, not flinching, not making a sound as she sees him race after her body and he starts hitting her and kicking her, making low grunts with the exertion (no wonder I’m so fucking sore you asshole). She can see the other Alex tiring, cowering, hunching over for protection, but again it’s too late and she knows all she’s thinking is Where the fuck are you, Bobby? and-
//
-how he gets to the door he will never remember (in a jiffy Eames, be there in a jiffy, 1/100th of a second, okay?), but he does remember slamming his shoulder up against it so hard he bruises the next day, though he never sees the bruise himself, because by then he’s heavily sedated in a psychiatric hospital. But now, the door flies open and Bobby flies through it and flies at the pair of them in the corner and he can hear the sounds of him punching her, the indescribable sounds of his fists and feet on her body and those sounds rip his tenuous hold on sanity clean off, at least temporarily, because-
//
-the dark monster of her nightmares isn’t a monster at all, she sees, but Bobby, looming over them, enraged and screaming at Nagy to STOPSTOPRIGHTNOW. He’s screaming stop over and over again and she leans forward, closer to the screen so she doesn’t miss a thing. He got there much, much quicker than it felt, but still too late, in the end, because she can see the other Alex is no longer moving now, not fighting back and not even defending herself anymore, but is simply-
//
-lying there, motionless, and the blood, all the blood, her blood on her face and in her hair, on the floor beneath, and her arms and legs all splayed awkward, and he sees Nagy, crouched over her, getting ready to kick again and there is a white light that flashes in his head that is bright like lightning or a nuclear explosion, wiping out everything any rational thought in his mind like don’t touch him because if you do you will fucking kill him and then you’ll be in big trouble and he grabs Nagy around the neck with a roaring sound that is a scream because the scream also erases anything else that is in his head like he’s killed her because I didn’t get here fast enough the fucker killed her she’s dead she’s dead now and I killed her just like he did and with his hands tight around Nagy’s neck he slams his head down on the floor over and over and over-
//
-and over and this time she does make a sound like a gasp or cry, and she does flinch and puts her hand over her mouth and Ross looks at her, watches her watching Bobby wrap his hands around Nagy’s neck, drag him down, slam his head down onto the concrete once, twice, three times, four, five, until four hulking, bellowing officers converge like a tumble of dark thunderclouds, and there’s a lot of grappling and arms flailing and yelling and they wrestle him away, away, off the screen and only two figures are left lying there, both completely still, both very bloody, both looking very dead.
The tape ends, the screen goes black. It’s quiet in the room but for Alex’s harsh breaths that keep catching in her throat, which is dry and pinched painfully closed. Jim the tech guy fiddles with some buttons and looks at no one, especially Alex.
Ross coughs, and coughs again.
“Eames…I’m sorry, but I thought you needed to-”
“What I need,” she says in a voice that doesn’t sound quite like hers, “is to go home now. What I need is…a good sleep.” She looks directly at Ross, her eyes dry. “I have an appointment in the morning.”
//
Her apartment - recently cleaned by her sister, she assumes - smells like lemon and Windex with undertones of apple spice and completely unlike herself. The rug has been vacuumed, coffee table tidied, laundry done and put away. She suspects her books have been alphabetized, but she’s too scared to look.
(A place for everything and everything-)
She looks around helplessly, without a thought on how to proceed. One thing, she thinks. Do one thing. Then, when that thing is done, do the next thing. Much easier than trying to do it all at once, or even think about doing it all at once.
She shoulders off her coat. It falls to the floor. Fine. That’s fine. It’s done. She kicks off her shoes. Done. She takes a deep breath, and another. Good. Breathing is good. Keep breathing. She goes to her impossibly clean kitchen and pours a glass of water. She drinks it. She pours another. She drinks that one, too. Then, she throws it all up in the sink. Done. She wipes her mouth. Keep breathing.
She goes to the bathroom (lemon), washes her face. Her skin feels dry and gritty beneath her fingertips. The room feels too big. Everything is too big after the miniscule world of the hospital room. There is too much space. She might go crazy if left too long in here. No. Bad word. Wrong word.
Keep breathing. Good.
She runs a bath and undresses and stares at herself in the bathroom mirror. It’s the first time she’s really looked at herself, she realizes. Not good. Too many unnatural colours. Later. I’ll think about how I look later.
She gets in the bath, which is hot. Good. She slides down until her chin touches the top of the water, (take a breath) then even further, until her head is submerged and strands of her hair float on the surface. Not breathing now, she thinks. But, that’s good, too.
Finally, after she’s washed and dried and dressed and has called her parents and her sister to let them know she’s fine and very tired and has taken her pain medication and is going to sleep right now, she rolls over in her bed, pushes her face into her pillow (her bed, her pillow thank god), and replays the impossible images from the tape over and over and over in her mind and cries like her heart is cracking wide open.
//
The hospital is large and imposing and sterile and everything she imagined, really. Her father drops her off at the front with promises to return when she calls.
“All right?” he asks, his eyes alight with worry.
She nods, her throat too tight to speak. She kisses his cheek, opens the door with a sweat-slick hand, walks on wobbly legs with a sick stomach.
She is buzzed in, signed in, waves her badge, shows she has no gun, no knife, no drugs, and she’s suddenly gripped with a fear so ragged and intense she stops and closes her eyes, fighting back a surge of nausea.
Bobby is in here? No. No no no. It isn’t possible it isn’t right.
“Detective Eames.” A nurse appears, shakes her damp hand. “We halved his medication today in anticipation of your visit.”
How thoughtful.
“He’s more lucid than usual, but still confused. Don’t worry, though, he’s no longer violent.” She leans forward in what she believes to be a comforting manner. “He won’t hurt you.”
Alex blinks back hot tears. You are all so stupid, she thinks. And this is so stupid and so wrong and all of you fucking people are just so fucking stupid. “He’d never hurt me. Ever,” is what she says instead, to no one in particular and anyone within listening distance.
The nurse just smiles gently in an I-Know-Better kind of way and pats Alex’s arm. Alex wants to kick her, hard. “He’s in there.” She points to a room to the right, then walks away. Alex stands still for a moment, feeling her heart knock around in her chest like a wild thing trying to escape, then she makes her feet move forward, towards the room on the right.
//
It has been a rather typical morning for Bobby, consisting of waking (7 a.m.), rising (7:30 a.m.), dressing (blue shirt, jeans, slippers at 7:45 a.m.), medicating (8 a.m., not as many pills today, for some reason), eating (eggs and toast at 8:30 a.m.), a visit from someone with a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff (9 a.m.), and finally a trip to the dayroom (9:30 a.m.), which is where he’s been waiting now for more than an hour. Waiting for what, he’s not sure, but he feels he must be waiting for something, or someone, because…well. Because.
He’s sitting on the striped sofa and staring at the opposite wall (light green, three framed photos of flowers), and staring out the window (trees, birds) and staring down at his hands (large, long-fingered, dangerous, a killer’s hands-nono, stopthatnow), which actually feel connected to his arms today (strange, that), when, as so often happens these days, he hears her voice.
“Bobby?”
He looks up and his vision focuses a little quicker than usual (also strange) and yes, there she is, standing a few feet away, staring at him. But, she’s dead, he knows, so he’s imagining this. He smiles, but she doesn’t smile back. She looks, actually, like she might be crying, which concerns him.
“Oh, Bobby.” She is crying, but she wipes her eyes quickly, so he won’t see (but he already has and why wouldn’t she want him to see anyway strange, strange day).
“Eames?” He closes his eyes. He opens them. She’s still there, staring at him with stricken, disbelieving, wet eyes, and he forces himself to focus harder, and it works, because he sees her more clearly than he has in a long time and ohgod her face-
“You’re…you’re all messed up.” He stares at her, his eyes tracing the map of purples and yellows across her forehead and cheeks, the puce-colour swelling around her left eye. “What happened to your face?” He knows his voice is getting louder and he feels a white hot anger roiling and rising in his gut and realizes he hasn’t felt that for awhile. He hasn’t felt anything for awhile. Something is…different.
Her hand flutters up to touch self-consciously. Her right hand, he notices, because her left is held in a sling against her sweater and what the fuck is going on?
“It doesn’t matter, okay? Okay? Nothing matters right now except-”
And, as he so often does when he hears her voice, he reaches out for her…but, this time he actually touches her. Or, rather, she touches him, which is odd. She moves closer and takes his hand, puts it to her cheek. It’s wet. His mind processes this fact. Her face is warm, and it’s wet. What does this mean? Her face has never been warm and wet before. Because, she’s dead. She’s dead.
Isn’t she?
“Who hurt you?” The anger is still there, still throbbing and threatening, but he’s keeping it at bay, because something is definitely different today.
She shakes her head. “Bobby-”
His mind whirls, clinks and clanks and things start to fall into place (a place for everything and everything-) and he shakes his head clear, clearer than it’s been in days and days.
“Are you really here?” he asks then, suspicion battling with trepidation and fear and anger.
“Yes. Yes. It’s me,” she says, nodding almost furiously. “I’m here I’m not-”
“-not dead.”
“No.”
Oh. Ohgod.
And at last she comes very close and she puts her arms around him in a desperate, clumsy hug, and half falls onto him, into his lap, and she buries her face in his neck and digs her good fingers into his back and he can smell her and touch her and ohgod it is her, not some vision, not some delusion, and he sucks in breath and puts his arms around her (they don’t feel like lead today but only logs so it’s easier), and he pulls her to him, hoping he doesn’t hurt her but desperate to get her as close as possible because he can’t let her get away again, and he does hear her make a noise against the skin of his neck when he clutches her, but it isn’t a gasp of pain, no, she’s crying and laughing at the same time, which, he realizes, means she’s happy, maybe, and maybe he is, too, almost unbearably so.
Something different, indeed.
//
tbc
Author: Scribere Est Agere
Pairing: Goren/Eames
Spoilers: After Purgatory
Rating: M
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me.
Summary: May be your own.
//
I know the darkness pulls on you
But it’s just a point of view
When you’re outside looking in
You belong to someone
~ Brandi Carlile, Looking Out
//
He floats for some time in a drug-induced haze in a world that has no colour, but is all colours, at once. Odd, but not overly distressing. There is light and sound, but he can’t make sense of any of it (random clanks and clicks and slaps and slams and unfamiliar voices allinajumble sometimes slow sometimes reallyfast), and every time he tries to sort it out, he remembers he really doesn’t want to do that, so he simply stops, and lets himself float again. It’s so easy, to just let go, and all in all, not really a bad way to pass the time now that-
No no. Let’s not think about that. Let’s think about this instead:
The word avocado comes from the Aztec word ahuacate, meaning testicle.
Fascinating, really, and really? He’ll never eat another avocado in his life.
Human sperm comes in three varieties: Some drive toward the egg, some exist only to kill, and some to obstruct other men’s sperm. The relative proportions found in semen depends on the man’s belief at the time of ejaculation about whether his are the only sperm there.
Another reason why he, himself, will never procreate, because he, himself, will always assume someone else (someone better) has gotten there first.
The largest Island in Canada is Baffin Island, the fifth biggest island on Earth. Only two US states are bigger than Baffin Island: Alaska and Texas. Baffin Island is more than double the size of the UK and slightly smaller than France.
Oh, Canada. He carries a Loonie in his pocket, received from the trusty Coin Of the Month Club, and he fully intends to use it, one day.
Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliaphobia is the fear of long words.
He’ll have to remember to tell Eames that one, just to see her roll her eyes and smile in that way she has when he’s said something both irritating and endearing and-
Oh. Ohgod. See where thinking gets you, Goren? Nowhere good, that’s where. The colourless colours swirl and churn and his stomach clenches and knots and as he leans over the side of his bed and heaves and heaves he realizes he really knows only one thing: that everyone he loves is dead or gone and Eames is dead and gone and really, nothing else matters anymore, not random useless facts, not colours, not his name or date of birth, not anything.
//
The day she is to be released, Ross appears in the doorway.
“You’re looking better,” he says. She only nods, struggling to adjust her hoodie over her sling. She know she looks like shit, but she’s polite, and she’s up and mobile and the pain is only mildly agonizing today, so, there’s that.
“Your father’s coming?”
“In about an hour. They want me to stay with my sister for a few days, but honestly, I’d get more rest at the precinct than at her house.”
Ross smiles. He’s waiting. She knows he’s waiting.
“And I’m seeing Bobby tomorrow. I have an appointment at 11 a.m. And even to do that, I had to use my menacing cop voice. And give my badge number. And your name as a reference.” She smoothes her hair down awkwardly. She needs a shower, a real shower, but lifting her good arm up with her ribs taped is…She sighs. Maybe she should stay with Liz after all.
“Eames. It’s not…a good idea.” Ross sighs. “He’s still…”
“I need to see him.” Her entire body aches and she’s so exhausted she might fall asleep standing up. “I need to...” She swallows. “He doesn’t belong there.”
Ross sighs again, leans against the door jamb. Alex’s hand is shaking. She shoves it into her pocket.
“I mean, don’t you agree? You can’t think…you don’t think he needs to be there.” She looks at him. He doesn’t answer. “Do you?”
He takes a few steps inside, reluctantly.
“Eames, you and I know…we both know, better than anyone, what he’s gone through the past few years. His mother. Frank. Nicole. Donny. Declan.” The names of the dead and departed ring loudly in the small room. All those losses, all that pain. “Any one of them might have been enough to push him past his breaking point. But then…you. You.”
She shakes her head.
(He’s going to need you, so you have to go back)
“Maybe you don’t want to hear it, but you mean more to Goren than anyone else in the world, and I’m talking even before he lost everyone else in his life. I stood next to him that day, watching him watch you, and I saw his face when Nagy-”
He stops and swallows.
“Something…something inside him changed. Do you understand? And he went running and he slammed that door open and grabbed Nagy and I couldn’t have stopped him if I tried, unless I’d used my gun.” He pauses. “And believe me, I considered it.”
(a man who has nothing left to lose is a man possessed is the most dangerous man in the world)
Eames shakes her head. “It doesn’t mean-”
“It might mean he does need a…rest. It might. He might be…better off in a facility that can…help him. Have you thought of that?”
“Actually, I haven’t.”
“You also haven’t even seen him yet.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“It might.”
“It won’t. There’s nothing wrong with him. He saved my life.” Don’t cry, Alex. Do not cry. “And now, it’s my turn to repay the favour.”
They stare at one another. Alex can hear her heart beating.
“Fine. Fine.” Ross takes another step closer. She can see, then, how utterly fatigued he looks and it hits her then what a toll all this has taken on him, too. He’s aged at least 10 years. “But do me a favour first, all right? Call your father…tell him to meet you at the precinct instead in a few hours.”
She looks at him.
“I need you to see something.”
//
Bobby counts ceiling tiles (159) until his eyes blur more than usual even, practices wiggling his fingers and toes, recalls interesting facts (a “jiffy” is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second), tries to convince himself that this place is better than Tates, because at least here he gets enough to drink and eat and the people looking after him are infinitely gentle with their touches and voices and it doesn’t smell too bad (Lysol and laundry detergent and steamed peas and urine), and whatever they’re giving him is the good shit because it mostly keeps the bad thoughts away and he sleeps for long periods of time without too many dreams, except for very occasionally when images slip in here and there and because he’s curious (he always was the most curious child his mother said so but his mother’s dead), he allows himself access to them, just to test himself, just to keep his mind agile, and besides, he gets to see Eames again and hear her voice, even if he knows none of it is real. Because Eames is dead, too.
He knows what’s real and what is not, because he’s not really crazy, until it comes to her, but this is real, what he remembers from that day-
//
It’s dark in the viewing room, and the flickering, grainy screen takes centre stage. Alex sits uneasily in front of the viewer, with Ross standing to her right, and Jim, the young, nervous tech guy (“You want to watch what?”), to her left. Ross was able to sneak her in without any of her colleagues seeing, thank god, because she knows she wouldn’t be able to say a single word to anyone, or hear a single word of sympathy, or see a single pitying look, without bursting into tears. So now, here she sits, and she really doesn’t want to watch, but she can’t look away, either. So long ago, it seems, another lifetime, how can it be less than two weeks, and she and Nagy sitting across from one another, long silver table between them. She looks incredibly small and defenseless. She wants to reach through the screen and grab herself by the shoulders, tell herself to run before it’s too late. But, it is too late, even now, because Nagy has leaned forward, and even from her vantage point through the screen, she can see his eyes go flat and dead, can see his fingers grip the table, can almost hear Bobby behind her-
//
-his hands flat against the window, pounding, pounding out a frantic warning to her, pounding hard enough, he thinks, to shatter the glass. He sees her shoulders go back, her whole body tense because she knows something has changed, that the real Nagy has emerged at last, and maybe she’s remembering his words of caution, too, and she knows how dangerous he is, she saw it herself on the girl in the morgue, so why isn’t she moving, why isn’t she running, because Bobby knows what’s coming even before it happens, before Nagy stands and grabs the chair and shoves it under the door handle and turns back to her-
//
-and slaps her hard and fast across the face as she’s reaching for her gun (too slow too fucking slow but I was so surprised I can’t be blamed I can’t) and she manages to kick him once, twice, which only infuriates him more, and he picks her up and throws her, and what surprises Alex is how fast it all happens, seconds, really, but she keeps it together as she watches, not flinching, not making a sound as she sees him race after her body and he starts hitting her and kicking her, making low grunts with the exertion (no wonder I’m so fucking sore you asshole). She can see the other Alex tiring, cowering, hunching over for protection, but again it’s too late and she knows all she’s thinking is Where the fuck are you, Bobby? and-
//
-how he gets to the door he will never remember (in a jiffy Eames, be there in a jiffy, 1/100th of a second, okay?), but he does remember slamming his shoulder up against it so hard he bruises the next day, though he never sees the bruise himself, because by then he’s heavily sedated in a psychiatric hospital. But now, the door flies open and Bobby flies through it and flies at the pair of them in the corner and he can hear the sounds of him punching her, the indescribable sounds of his fists and feet on her body and those sounds rip his tenuous hold on sanity clean off, at least temporarily, because-
//
-the dark monster of her nightmares isn’t a monster at all, she sees, but Bobby, looming over them, enraged and screaming at Nagy to STOPSTOPRIGHTNOW. He’s screaming stop over and over again and she leans forward, closer to the screen so she doesn’t miss a thing. He got there much, much quicker than it felt, but still too late, in the end, because she can see the other Alex is no longer moving now, not fighting back and not even defending herself anymore, but is simply-
//
-lying there, motionless, and the blood, all the blood, her blood on her face and in her hair, on the floor beneath, and her arms and legs all splayed awkward, and he sees Nagy, crouched over her, getting ready to kick again and there is a white light that flashes in his head that is bright like lightning or a nuclear explosion, wiping out everything any rational thought in his mind like don’t touch him because if you do you will fucking kill him and then you’ll be in big trouble and he grabs Nagy around the neck with a roaring sound that is a scream because the scream also erases anything else that is in his head like he’s killed her because I didn’t get here fast enough the fucker killed her she’s dead she’s dead now and I killed her just like he did and with his hands tight around Nagy’s neck he slams his head down on the floor over and over and over-
//
-and over and this time she does make a sound like a gasp or cry, and she does flinch and puts her hand over her mouth and Ross looks at her, watches her watching Bobby wrap his hands around Nagy’s neck, drag him down, slam his head down onto the concrete once, twice, three times, four, five, until four hulking, bellowing officers converge like a tumble of dark thunderclouds, and there’s a lot of grappling and arms flailing and yelling and they wrestle him away, away, off the screen and only two figures are left lying there, both completely still, both very bloody, both looking very dead.
The tape ends, the screen goes black. It’s quiet in the room but for Alex’s harsh breaths that keep catching in her throat, which is dry and pinched painfully closed. Jim the tech guy fiddles with some buttons and looks at no one, especially Alex.
Ross coughs, and coughs again.
“Eames…I’m sorry, but I thought you needed to-”
“What I need,” she says in a voice that doesn’t sound quite like hers, “is to go home now. What I need is…a good sleep.” She looks directly at Ross, her eyes dry. “I have an appointment in the morning.”
//
Her apartment - recently cleaned by her sister, she assumes - smells like lemon and Windex with undertones of apple spice and completely unlike herself. The rug has been vacuumed, coffee table tidied, laundry done and put away. She suspects her books have been alphabetized, but she’s too scared to look.
(A place for everything and everything-)
She looks around helplessly, without a thought on how to proceed. One thing, she thinks. Do one thing. Then, when that thing is done, do the next thing. Much easier than trying to do it all at once, or even think about doing it all at once.
She shoulders off her coat. It falls to the floor. Fine. That’s fine. It’s done. She kicks off her shoes. Done. She takes a deep breath, and another. Good. Breathing is good. Keep breathing. She goes to her impossibly clean kitchen and pours a glass of water. She drinks it. She pours another. She drinks that one, too. Then, she throws it all up in the sink. Done. She wipes her mouth. Keep breathing.
She goes to the bathroom (lemon), washes her face. Her skin feels dry and gritty beneath her fingertips. The room feels too big. Everything is too big after the miniscule world of the hospital room. There is too much space. She might go crazy if left too long in here. No. Bad word. Wrong word.
Keep breathing. Good.
She runs a bath and undresses and stares at herself in the bathroom mirror. It’s the first time she’s really looked at herself, she realizes. Not good. Too many unnatural colours. Later. I’ll think about how I look later.
She gets in the bath, which is hot. Good. She slides down until her chin touches the top of the water, (take a breath) then even further, until her head is submerged and strands of her hair float on the surface. Not breathing now, she thinks. But, that’s good, too.
Finally, after she’s washed and dried and dressed and has called her parents and her sister to let them know she’s fine and very tired and has taken her pain medication and is going to sleep right now, she rolls over in her bed, pushes her face into her pillow (her bed, her pillow thank god), and replays the impossible images from the tape over and over and over in her mind and cries like her heart is cracking wide open.
//
The hospital is large and imposing and sterile and everything she imagined, really. Her father drops her off at the front with promises to return when she calls.
“All right?” he asks, his eyes alight with worry.
She nods, her throat too tight to speak. She kisses his cheek, opens the door with a sweat-slick hand, walks on wobbly legs with a sick stomach.
She is buzzed in, signed in, waves her badge, shows she has no gun, no knife, no drugs, and she’s suddenly gripped with a fear so ragged and intense she stops and closes her eyes, fighting back a surge of nausea.
Bobby is in here? No. No no no. It isn’t possible it isn’t right.
“Detective Eames.” A nurse appears, shakes her damp hand. “We halved his medication today in anticipation of your visit.”
How thoughtful.
“He’s more lucid than usual, but still confused. Don’t worry, though, he’s no longer violent.” She leans forward in what she believes to be a comforting manner. “He won’t hurt you.”
Alex blinks back hot tears. You are all so stupid, she thinks. And this is so stupid and so wrong and all of you fucking people are just so fucking stupid. “He’d never hurt me. Ever,” is what she says instead, to no one in particular and anyone within listening distance.
The nurse just smiles gently in an I-Know-Better kind of way and pats Alex’s arm. Alex wants to kick her, hard. “He’s in there.” She points to a room to the right, then walks away. Alex stands still for a moment, feeling her heart knock around in her chest like a wild thing trying to escape, then she makes her feet move forward, towards the room on the right.
//
It has been a rather typical morning for Bobby, consisting of waking (7 a.m.), rising (7:30 a.m.), dressing (blue shirt, jeans, slippers at 7:45 a.m.), medicating (8 a.m., not as many pills today, for some reason), eating (eggs and toast at 8:30 a.m.), a visit from someone with a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff (9 a.m.), and finally a trip to the dayroom (9:30 a.m.), which is where he’s been waiting now for more than an hour. Waiting for what, he’s not sure, but he feels he must be waiting for something, or someone, because…well. Because.
He’s sitting on the striped sofa and staring at the opposite wall (light green, three framed photos of flowers), and staring out the window (trees, birds) and staring down at his hands (large, long-fingered, dangerous, a killer’s hands-nono, stopthatnow), which actually feel connected to his arms today (strange, that), when, as so often happens these days, he hears her voice.
“Bobby?”
He looks up and his vision focuses a little quicker than usual (also strange) and yes, there she is, standing a few feet away, staring at him. But, she’s dead, he knows, so he’s imagining this. He smiles, but she doesn’t smile back. She looks, actually, like she might be crying, which concerns him.
“Oh, Bobby.” She is crying, but she wipes her eyes quickly, so he won’t see (but he already has and why wouldn’t she want him to see anyway strange, strange day).
“Eames?” He closes his eyes. He opens them. She’s still there, staring at him with stricken, disbelieving, wet eyes, and he forces himself to focus harder, and it works, because he sees her more clearly than he has in a long time and ohgod her face-
“You’re…you’re all messed up.” He stares at her, his eyes tracing the map of purples and yellows across her forehead and cheeks, the puce-colour swelling around her left eye. “What happened to your face?” He knows his voice is getting louder and he feels a white hot anger roiling and rising in his gut and realizes he hasn’t felt that for awhile. He hasn’t felt anything for awhile. Something is…different.
Her hand flutters up to touch self-consciously. Her right hand, he notices, because her left is held in a sling against her sweater and what the fuck is going on?
“It doesn’t matter, okay? Okay? Nothing matters right now except-”
And, as he so often does when he hears her voice, he reaches out for her…but, this time he actually touches her. Or, rather, she touches him, which is odd. She moves closer and takes his hand, puts it to her cheek. It’s wet. His mind processes this fact. Her face is warm, and it’s wet. What does this mean? Her face has never been warm and wet before. Because, she’s dead. She’s dead.
Isn’t she?
“Who hurt you?” The anger is still there, still throbbing and threatening, but he’s keeping it at bay, because something is definitely different today.
She shakes her head. “Bobby-”
His mind whirls, clinks and clanks and things start to fall into place (a place for everything and everything-) and he shakes his head clear, clearer than it’s been in days and days.
“Are you really here?” he asks then, suspicion battling with trepidation and fear and anger.
“Yes. Yes. It’s me,” she says, nodding almost furiously. “I’m here I’m not-”
“-not dead.”
“No.”
Oh. Ohgod.
And at last she comes very close and she puts her arms around him in a desperate, clumsy hug, and half falls onto him, into his lap, and she buries her face in his neck and digs her good fingers into his back and he can smell her and touch her and ohgod it is her, not some vision, not some delusion, and he sucks in breath and puts his arms around her (they don’t feel like lead today but only logs so it’s easier), and he pulls her to him, hoping he doesn’t hurt her but desperate to get her as close as possible because he can’t let her get away again, and he does hear her make a noise against the skin of his neck when he clutches her, but it isn’t a gasp of pain, no, she’s crying and laughing at the same time, which, he realizes, means she’s happy, maybe, and maybe he is, too, almost unbearably so.
Something different, indeed.
//
tbc