Title: Secret Keeper 1/4
Author:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
laguera25
Fandom: CSI:NY/HP
Rating: FRM
Pairing: Flack/OFC
SPOILERS: HP through HBP; CSI:NY through S6, especially "Pay Up" and "Cuckoo's Nest."
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events in the NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis.
All characters in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: Set immediately after "Skin" in the Flack/Stanhope crackverse.
When Don Flack was twenty-four, he'd met his wife on Thirty-Fourth Street. He'd quite literally run into her as he'd pursued a perp down the crowded sidewalk. He'd bellowed for people to get out of the way, dammit, and she'd tried, but her chair was slow and he'd been fast, and he'd run headlong into her, stumbling and staggering and sending her ass-over-teakettle onto the filthy pavement as he'd blundered on in search of his quarry. The collision had broken her wrist and left a deep, horizontal bruise across his thighs where quadricep had met titanium and plastic.
He'd been breathless then, winded and sweating and light-boned with adrenaline as he'd straddled his prey and wrestled him into cuffs that had glinted in the weak, winter sun. He'd spared little thought for her in those first hectic moments after the chase, but had thought instead of the dangerous, drawn-bowstring thrum of the man beneath him, the thrashing, impotent anger of a snared cur. The man would have wounded him if given the chance, would have bucked and twisted and sunk his rotten, junkie's teeth into his forearm in a final, futile act of defiance. The collar wasn't good until the perp was in the cage, and so he'd ignored the press and swell of the crowd around him and the low, furious mutter of suppressed pain and focused on the grotty, uncharitable business of survival.
It wasn't until later, when the suspect had been locked securely in the squad car and he'd been waiting for the adrenaline to ebb from his veins, that he'd begun to worry about the squawking blur that he'd trampled in his pursuit of justice. He'd stood on the sidewalk with his hands on his hips and surveyed the aftermath. Her wheelchair had lain in the center of the pavement, one wheel bent and the spokes a warped, flaccid muddle of useless steel. The gawkers that had gathered to watch the spectacle of the chase had begun to mill and drift like dissipating fog, and as he'd watched, a thin man with chapped cheeks and a grey, woolen overcoat had carelessly stepped over her chair as though it were of no more consequence than a crushed insect. It had looked flimsy and pathetic amid the indifferent bustle of the city, and guilt had slithered into his gut like the onset of nausea. He'd grimaced in regret and moved to set the chair to rights. It had sat, but badly, listing drunkenly on its warped wheel, and when he'd chanced an experimental roll, he'd been greeted by an anguished, atonal keening from the abused wheel.
She had been in the ambulance, small and vulpine between the two white-shirted paramedics who'd hovered over her and bombarded her with questions and prodded her with the invasive tools of their trade. Tired and disheveled, she'd been, pale and slumped, her golden hair tousled and framing a thin face white with pain and wan with exhaustion. Their eyes had met briefly as he'd peered into the ambulance, and he'd seen contempt and frustration.
He doesn't know why he went to the hospital that evening. He supposes he'd been driven by conscience, by the kerchief-wearing Boy Scout that lurked beneath his smartass New York skin. He'd become a cop to help people, to protect the weak and unwary from the ravenous, disease-jawed thugs who bullied and raped and murdered for the sheer, ugly pleasure of it. There had been other motives, of course--his father's vaunted legacy had loomed large over his childhood and influenced his boyhood dreaming, an unseen yet tangible force that had steered him down the inevitable, predestinate path to the academy and away from the sweeter, more innocent dreams of becoming the next Wolfgang Puck--but in the end, the choice had been his to make, and he'd made it because he'd wanted to be a light in a city of shadows and streets that led to nowhere and squalid, lonely nothingness. He'd wanted to be a knight in blue with a shield of gold, a protector of the kingdom, and of maidens even if they weren't the fairest in the land. He supposes he'd gone because knights didn't knock maidens from their chariots and leave them in the dust. Such was the way of the knave, and he'd been determined never to wear such an ignoble mantle.
So he'd gone to the hospital to apologize and retain his standing as a knight of good grace, to reassure himself that he was a good guy and not a thoughtless brute who trod on helpless damsels and left them to lick their wounds. He's sure that if he were ever to confess this to her, she would roll her eyes and laugh and leave the needling promise of her teeth on the delicate flesh of his heart with an acerbic barb. Or maybe she wouldn't be so delicate now; maybe in the shadow of Angell's death and all of the terrible things that have come tumbling after, she would be crueler, would bite, not to mark, but to rend and tear and bruise. Perhaps even break, tooth on bone and sinew pulled from muscle and marrow slurped with greasy, blood-flecked lips. He wouldn't be surprised. She is different now, and so is he, and so is everything else.
It had been stupid, absurd, really, to think of her as weak, but he hadn't known her then, hadn't understood the fierce heart that had beaten behind that fragile, birdbone chest. Then, he'd seen only her tiny body and rounded shoulders and the loose, madcap joints fashioned by a clumsy, idiot hand. He'd been just another ignorant fool who'd seen only the least of her, her flaws and her odd, non-Euclidean angles. It wasn't until later that he would come to his epiphany and behold the unlikely greatness of her, the undimmed glory hidden beneath the dirt and bitterness and unceasing rage that so often bound her to herself. That night, she'd been just another-hard luck soul in need of a helping hand.
He'd learned better, though, in the days and weeks that followed, when he'd called her to discuss reimbursement for the damage to her chair. He'd discovered a spine of tempered steel beneath that pale skin and a will to match, a stubbornness deep enough to propel her through the world's merciless waters. She'd had a brilliant mind and a rapier wit and a serrated tongue that could cleave through the bullshit with a single, disdainful snap of her jaws. She'd been a crystal chandelier in a tinpot outhouse, such a marvelous incongruity that he could only marvel, the receiver of the precinct phone tucked in the hollow of his shoulder while he doodled on a legal pad to give the impression of industry.
There had been an indefinable sweetness behind her craggy, aloof exterior, a sense of wonder that he had long counted as lost in this city of cynics and survivors. She'd hated society with the pucker-mouthed bitterness of the perpetually-wounded, but she'd loved the world and embraced its wonders, its miracles and its ironies. She could make him laugh until his stomach was sprung and hot, could seed humor into her wry musings with an expert's hand, sugar cast carelessly atop a field of ash. She had lost her innocence long ago, sloughed it as if it were a skin too tight for her warped bones, but she hadn't surrendered her hope. It had burned less brightly than her anger, but no less fiercely, and he'd been in awe of her.
Soon, he'd found reasons to call her from home, stretched on the couch they would later share, the ugly, brown sofa on which his wriggling infant son would one day shit with gummy, gleeful gusto. He'd called to hear her voice and to coax that elusive sweetness to the surface with a prospector's infinite patience, sifting carefully through the hard, stony sediment of her heart to find flecks of gold and diamond dust. And he'd found it, more than he'd ever expected, a rich, untapped vein of it that he suspects no one before him had seen, much less touched with wondering, reverent hands. She'd guarded it jealously at first, had hidden it behind the rapier and the barbs and the brutal frankness that willed her out of bed and marched her through the unceasing grind of her days with the jut-jawed defiance of the damned, but he could be stubborn, too, a trait he'd earned from his parents and their hard-scrabble Irish and Italian roots. His mother had been a tough Italian beauty who'd come up the hard way in the Bronx, working two jobs by fifteen and helping her own parents with the upbringing of her three younger siblings. His father had been a bull-headed shanty Irish boy from Yonkers with a smart mouth and a burning desire to wash the mealy, soapscum taste of watery potato soup from his mouth, and they'd raised children cut from the same cloth, tough and ambitious and smart enough to get where they wanted to go. He'd wanted her, and he'd pursued her with the same single-minded determination he'd applied to junior college and the academy.
Eventually, she'd let him catch her.
When Don Flack was still twenty-four, he'd fallen in love at a Yankees game, as going, going, gone as the Derek Jeter homerun that had arced high over the stadium wall and disappeared into the night. Wish I may, wish I might, he'd thought as he'd watched her watch the ball drift across the sky like a falling star, and he'd wished that she would love him, invite her into her secret garden and create an Eden with him there. He'd watched her watch the ball, and when it was gone, he'd kissed her, had tasted mustard and relish and sweetness on her tongue.
Going, going, gone.
When Don Flack was still twenty-four, he'd stolen her virginity, twisting and writhing atop the rumpled bedsheets of his narrow bachelor's bed. He'd claimed her with a grunt and a sigh, eyes screwed shut against the hot-bellied, delirious pleasure of it, and she'd gasped and mewled and gritted her teeth against the pain of tribute, and she'd bled on his sheets. Blood had been smeared on her thighs when they'd parted, and her sweat had been sticky on his thighs and the coarse thatch of hair between his legs. It had been a mingling, an exchange, the signature on an unspoken covenant. She was his, and he was hers. She'd lain with her legs parted, spraddle-legged and shivering, exposed and vulnerable and helpless, and for a moment as he'd looked down at her, he wondered what he'd done, if perhaps, he'd asked too much. But when the time had come to change the sheets, she'd helped him do it, had winced at the sting between her legs and moved gingerly, but she'd helped him all the same, his partner in the pleasure and in the dirty scut work of living, and he'd known as he'd watched her struggle to slip the sheet over the corner of the mattress that it was going to be okay. He'd helped her back into bed and soothed her shivering with kisses and caresses, and when she'd stilled and surrendered to sleep, he'd curled around her in the dark and felt her breath tickle his throat.
When Don Flack was twenty-five, he'd asked her to marry him. He'd sat across from her at Delmonico's and slid a small, velvet box across the white linen. His heart had been a timpani drum against his ribcage and his balls had been small, hot stones inside his pants. His sly, smart mouth had been suddenly stupid, and he'd mumbled and fumbled and bumbled his way through a proposal that had borne little resemblance to the one he'd practiced in his bathroom mirror, and then he'd lapsed into miserable silence, hands clammy and mouth dry and belly a knotted burlap sack beneath his flushed skin.
She had stared at the box that held his heart in silence, fettucine dangling from the tines of her fork, and then she'd put down her fork and picked up the box and wrestled it open with her spidery, palsied, recalcitrant hands. She'd surveyed the contents in silence, and for a terrible, swooning moment, he’d thought he’d miscalculated, misread the signs. Her eyes had been dark and her face had been white, and her breath had been a reedy whine.
“Is this what I think it is?” she’d asked, as though she dared not trust her eyes.
“Yeah, well, I just thought-,” he’d said, inarticulate when it had counted most, a bite of osso bucco a hard, dry pebble that threatened to lodge in his airway.
She had been fluent in his language even then, conversant in the tongue of a blue-collar kid with stars in his eyes and a worthless juco diploma lost in the jumble of his life. She had understood what his imbecile’s tongue couldn’t say, and she had smiled at him. The bright, feral child who trusted no one had trusted him, had pressed three cool fingers to his bumbling, burning lips and followed them with a kiss and a quiet, “Yes.”
He’d slipped the ring onto her finger and the check onto the table, and then he’d bade her follow him into the frigid February night. She’d followed him without a backward glance, and she’s followed him ever since, hand in hand and full of love’s unshakeable faith.
He wonders now if she regrets it, if perhaps she wishes she’d laid a trail of breadcrumbs to find her way back. He wonders if she lies in the dark and hates him for a liar. He wonders if she wishes she’d been smart enough to love someone else.
When Don Flack was twenty-six, he’d married her in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, smart and crisp in his dress blues and giddy inside his skin. She’d been lovely in her wedding dress, a china doll in white lace, and he’d marveled at her as they’d knelt before the altar and Father Carmichael. She’d knelt beside him despite the excruciating protests of her bony knees, lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line and blue eyes fixed on the cross above the altar as if to challenge God to deny her this moment of the sublime in an otherwise hard, ugly life. Her hand had been soft in his, but her spine had been ramrod straight. She’d been an angel unashamed in the presence of the Lord who had so thoughtlessly dashed her upon the earth, and he’d loved her with a ferocity that had teetered on the cusp of mania.
She’d hesitated when the father had asked if she would and did. Not long--a heartbeat and an indrawn breath--but long enough to squeeze the air from his chest and grey his vision at the edges. He'd frozen, sure that she had realized her mistake at the last instant and had decided to rescind her invitation to build his home inside her heart. He'd braced himself and waited for her to turn that defiant gaze on him, contempt and pity and recognition of her folly and relief that there was still time to retreat from the brink, but she had just stared at Father Carmichael, eyes wide and bewildered, a woman who had awakened from a pleasant daydream to find herself crouched before the jaws of a predatory beast.
He'd swallowed his triphammering heart and squeezed her hand, whether to awaken her from her nightmare or coax her over the precipice, he hadn't known. She'd startled and blinked and offered him a sidelong glance and a shy smile, and then she'd squared her shoulders and stepped over the precipice with an "I do" that had resounded through the cavernous, white-marble vault of the cathedral like the clarion of a bell. His insides had turned to wax and water and his lips to fire. He'd raised her veil and cupped her cheeks, which, for once, had been warm and rosy with happiness. He'd tilted her chin and bent his head, and there before God, His emissary, and five hundred people, he'd drunk deeply of her, his second hope and living font of grace unbidden.
When Don Flack was twenty-eight, he had nearly widowed her, traded the joyous white of her wedding gown for the austere black of mourning. It had been the last thing he'd intended to do that Sunday morning in May, when he'd slipped from their bed and her embrace and into his armor. He'd left her with a kiss and promised her that he'd be back soon. The next time he saw her, it had been eight days later and her heart had been as broken as his guts as she'd sat beside his hospital bed and held his limp hand to keep him from slipping into the cold, dark waters of eternity.
He thinks of that kiss often now, wishes he'd held it just a few seconds longer, had treasured it a little more. Maybe if he'd lingered, had taken the few precious seconds to cradle the thin cup of her skull in his hands and seek out the sweetness behind her teeth and beneath her tongue, if he'd kissed her as he'd meant it and not as duty had demanded it be, then he wouldn't be here now. Maybe that inconsequential delay would have meant that he would have missed his date with a plummeting Xerox machine. Maybe he would've gotten stuck in traffic, or maybe he would have been three steps behind Mac instead of ten ahead. If had had only kissed her as he ought, then he might have emerged with little more than ringing ears and a dirty face and skin scraped raw from the shrapnel of flying concrete. He might've come home to her with nothing more than dust in his mouth instead of the blood and poison and the cursed, too-sharp teeth with which he'd let the poison in.
When Don Flack was still twenty-eight, still a straw man with guts held together by thread and modern medicine, he had bitten the hand that had reached for him, bitten through flesh and blood to scrape bone and score raw, bleeding wounds in her tenderest places. He hadn't meant to hurt, only to deflect, to stay the constantly-grasping, hands that had clutched his arms or slithered around his neck or fluttered around his wounds like a panicked hummingbird, cool and solicitous and tender and strangling as ivy. He'd wanted peace, just five goddamned minutes to let his body be his own, to slip away from the gnawing pain of internal reconstruction.
But he'd been pain-rabid and tired and frightened, and the nip he'd intended had become a mindless snap of jaw. He'd had the fortune of the damned that miserable, weltering summer, and his teeth had battened onto her deepest wound, had tasted the sweet, high, pork-fat rot of her insecurity, the ugly, rancid meat of her loneliness and shame and heartbroken fear.
"Why don't you entertain yourself for a while? You've done enough damage," he'd snarled, exasperated and breathless with the pain she'd inflicted with an errant touch of her hand. Hurt and tired and cat-shit mean and possessed of the shameful urge to spread the wealth.
And his china doll had fractured, suddenly soft and frangible beneath her skin. He hadn't heard it, the grinding shift of grit and porcelain shards refashioning themselves into a new, unimagined whole, but seen it. It had been in the stiffness of her body, the shocked, inflexible spasticity of her arms as she'd fought the urge to curl them tight against her chest, the shriveled, atrophied forelimbs of a velociraptor. In the set of her jaw and the dimness of her eyes. Something vital and precious had failed catastrophically in that moment, had shorted and snapped and collapsed into rubble and left nothing but dust and negative space in its wake. It should've been fatal, should have brought her to her knees there beside the bed, but his china doll was greater than the material of her forging, and she had found the strength to drag herself away and leave him to his petty victory and his coveted rest.
He hadn't realized what he'd done, of course, not then. He'd been too tired and drugged and enamored of his righteous pique to notice, too drunk with pain and Vicodin to see that the fracture was no mere hairline fracture to be buffed away with an apology and salved with kisses and a candlelit dinner at Salvatore's, with the music slow and low and the garlic heavy and a bustling Italian nona in the miniscule restaurant kitchen, but a gaping fault that reached its jagged, pernicious fingers through flesh and bone and into her battle-scarred heart. It wasn't until later, when his belated apology had fallen on indifferent ears and the days and weeks and months had stretched into brittle silence that he'd begun to comprehend the extent of the damage, and when he had, he'd been rendered stupid and impotent in the face of it, boneless and powerless and inert, a blast-rattled survivor gazing gormlessly into the crater left behind by a speeding meteor.
He had tried to mend the damage then, but it was too late; the fracture had calcified and set and trapped the hurt inside, where it had simmered and festered and darkened her eyes. Her lips and her arms and her cunt had forgiven him, and maybe her heart had, too, but it has certainly never forgotten. It quails at the slightest shadow, and she freezes, eyes wide and teeth bared, ready to shut him out before he can hurt her again with his promises that break as soon as they leave his mouth, fragile as glass blown from sugar sand. The past looms large in her memory, and he has done precious little to make her forget it.
He knows now that he waited too long to salve that wound. He should have apologized the instant the words left his mouth, neutralized them with an “I’m sorry. I love you.” He should have dragged himself out of bed and pursued her into the living room, teeth clenched against the agonized, diseased-gum throb in his mending guts and swallowed his pain as she had swallowed hers for eight long days and seven long nights. He should have reached for her, drawn her in, and never mind if she snapped at him in a moment of blind heartache, returned a portion of the favor with a flash of teeth and cutting tongue. He should have loved her until her rage was spent, loved her anyway. It was how she had loved him until then, until that irrevocable moment when he’d chosen himself over her, let go of her hand and watched her drift away.
If he could go back now, he would, but he can’t, and so the knowledge is useless. It burns and shifts in his belly, a fragment of masonry that Dr. Singh’s keen eyes and nimbly-plucking fingers missed. Sometimes, when he is alone, in the stationhouse bathroom or crammed into a squad car and watching some derelict storefront for signs of the human cockroaches that skitter within its crumbling walls, he feels it stir, a momentary flutter behind his navel that reminds him of his son’s quickening inside her belly, a purposeful, exploratory tap beneath the skin. It’s the nucleus of something terrible, as alive and aware as his son had been as he’d bobbed and drifted in the warm, sheltering waters of his mother’s womb. He can’t see its face. It’s turned from him, the dark side of the moon, but he can see its soul, and that’s worse. He would tear it out if he could, reach inside himself and yank it out by the roots, but it’s too late for that. It’s too far gone, and he’s too afraid.
He wonders what it will look like when he finally sees its face. Part of him thinks he already knows, thinks he saw its profile in the dim, infernal light of a boiler room where a bad man went to die, saw its eyes in the glare of the muzzle flash in the instant before his bullet slammed into Simon Cade’s bastard, Jess-murdering head and left flash burns on his soul that still prickle and smart and burn even though he bathes them in Beam and the cold, silver waters of the moon.
Sweet child o’ mine, he thinks, and he grimaces as his belly cramps and rolls, trying, he supposes, to wrap its strangling fingers around his heart.
When Don Flack was twenty-nine, he had sat at this very table and poured salt into the wound that had never healed. He had hated himself for it, but he had done it all the same, because he was a knight in blue, and his kingdom had called him to arms. He had sat in this very chair with a fork in one hand and a knife in the other and sunk the latter into her unsuspecting back. He can still remember the way she’d looked at him when he’d opened his mouth and slid the knife home, the terrible stillness when she’d finally understood.
He’d expelled her from the Eden he’d offered her when he’d slipped a small, golden band onto her trembling finger, turned her out and barred the gate against her in the name of jewelry stolen from rich, Manhattan socialites who were too busy to miss the things they’d lost. He’d turned her out because the department asked him to, and because he’d been too much a coward then to refuse. He’d only been back on the job five months when the order came down, and he’d been afraid that if he turned down the assignment, then the brass would mark it as weakness and him as damaged goods and quietly shuffle him off the promotion grid. Disappointing them had been the greater of two terrors for him then, and God, that makes him want to laugh and cry at the same time, makes his gut roil with a shame that tastes like Beam and blood.
She, he’d told himself as he’d stepped out with a female undercover on his arm and ground his love’s heart beneath his heel with every traitorous step, would forgive him. The job wouldn’t. No choice, he’d reassured himself as he’d eaten shrimp canapes and oysters Rockefeller off polished silver trays and tried not to think of his apartment, empty and dark and dead as a deconsecrated church without her to light it. There had been no choice.
Oh, but there had been a choice. Always. He’d just been too much of a coward and a selfish bastard to make it. He’d gone on swilling hundred-dollar wine and dusting his skin with designer gowns and left her with a knife in her back and no place to crawl inside and lick the wound. He would laugh if it didn’t hurt so much.
She had been the one with no choice, and she had gone without a word, gone to her exile while he’d slept. She’d left not a trace of blood behind, had held in her guts until she was too far away to stain him. She had left only a single word scrawled on a black-and-white photograph and a letter entrusted to a witless hotel desk clerk. He's not sure which had hurt worse, the letter, redolent with sorrow and confusion and hurt and a love so deep it cut his insides, or that single, scrawled word, an open-mouthed howl of rage that even she could not contain. The letter had driven him to drink and the roof of their building, where he had jumped rope until his knees had throbbed and burned and screamed in sympathy, ground glass in his joints, but the word has never left him. It burns at the base of his brain like an incipient tumor, and sometimes, he sees it when he sits on the edge of the bed in the middle of the night and watches Rebecca sleep, too afraid to touch her, lest he leave yet another bruise. It flutters behind his eyelids like a dust mote and etches itself into the random tussocks and whorls of bedsheet. It scores and brands and sticks to his skin like a nettle, burrows deeper with every move he makes. He'd thought it meant for another, then, that terrible word, with its indictment and its hatred, but after last night, he wonders. Wonders and aches and wishes he'd been more careful with the miraculous gift he'd been given.
She had cried out only once, and then only because he'd asked more of a heart already straining beneath the burden he had asked it to bear. It had been a cry, not of rage and defiance, but of simply agony, of fragmenting bone and splintering heart, of blood oozing between clutching fingers and teeth stained plum with blood and lungs that cannot breathe with the weight of the world on their encapsulating chest.
You promised, she'd breathed into the phone, returned to the simple fairness of childhood in her disappointment. You promised me. And then when he'd remained sadly, steadfastly resolute in the face of her hurt, buffered from the stark, naked ugliness of it by the mercy of distance, you bastard. The dull, nasal whine of the broken connection in his ear, a child not too proud to cry.
And he had promised, had sat and this very table with steak cooling between them like a body and held her hands and told her that it wouldn't take long. Two weeks top, and then they'd take that vacation that he'd been promising for years and on which he'd never delivered. Just two weeks of spitting on the most sacred vows he had ever made in exchange for ten rushed days in whatever pisspot hotel and resort his ever-dwindling civil servant's salary could afford. She hadn't wanted the trade, had turned her face from it like a child from the bitterest of medicines, but in the end, she had opened wide and swallowed it down because she was a good wife, and because by then, she had known that she could expect no better, and even a mouthful of gall was better than the yawning nothing he so often offered her.
He had overestimated his skills, had been too stupid and too brash, and two weeks had spun into one hundred and seven days. One hundred and seven days adrift, with only her rage and her determination to bind her. One hundred and seven days of tears that he hadn't been there to wipe away, and Rebecca, that unearthly child of no wasted motion, had simply let them run. By the time he'd crept to the airport with his heart and a bouquet of wilting flowers in his sweating fist, they had carved deep grooves around her eyes and mouth and caused her mouth to buckle. She'd been bent and haggard beneath the weight of those one hundred and seven days, and when she'd looked at him as she'd rolled grimly down the concourse, she'd seen not her loving and remorseful husband, but a man come to lay another burden across her trembling, broken shoulders.
She said she'd forgiven him, had said it with lips and tongue and teeth and the greedy, lascivious, wet suction of her mouth as she'd hollowed her cheeks and swirled her tongue around his bucking, blindly-thrusting prick in a motel room that had stunk of musty sheets and melting filament and wet phonebook. Because even then he could not take her home and reinstall her upon her domestic throne; he had wanted to, had longed for it with a desperation that had made his muscles ache and throb and turn to taut cords beneath his flushed skin, but the department had insisted he stay the course, remain in the yoke it had so rudely thrust upon him even if he died in it, even if everything good and sweet in his dirty, grimy, monochromatic life of blood and bodies and squirming dead things died in it. He had stolen that night from its copper-toothed jaws in an act of petty defiance, had cradled her to himself until the sweat had dried on their bodies, had pressed his nose into the golden fall of her hair to smell clean skin and peaches and the heady odor of freshly-scythed wheat. And when sleep had taken her into its clutching depths and hidden his shame and cowardice from those lovely blue eyes, he'd taken up the yoke and abandoned her a second time.
And she had forgiven him a second time, had said so by the same means in their bed three weeks later. She had imparted her forgiveness with her cunning mouth and cool, splay-fingered hands and the wet, sucking warmth of her spasming, spastic cunt. She had kissed him and loved him, and she had cried out with a sound not born of pain, had shuddered and gasped and exacted what penance she would with short-clipped nails that raised red weals down his back. Forty lashes rendered in lines of four and soothed with her pliant, drowsy mouth.
She had forgiven him, perhaps, but she has never healed, never regained the sense of sure and equal footing that she had enjoyed in this apartment once upon a time, before his superiors had come with their badges and their self-importance and their need to play the political game and kicked her beloved castle to dust. Before he had shown his belly and betrayed her and stood aside to let them do it. Once upon a time, she had considered these walls, drab and cramped and insufficient to her needs as they are, her home, the secret place that the cruelties of the world could not violate with their thieving fingers and rapacious, devouring jaws, the one spot of cement earth that his job could not sully with its endless bowing, withering need. Once upon a time, she had thought him worthy of her devotion, a son of Helios and a prince among men. She had been proven wrong on both counts, and the knowledge had lain heavily upon her, had made her stumble where once she had sat tall and proud, to flinch at the rap upon the front door and to shy from his touch whenever it comes with tidings of which she is sure she cannot be glad, with another shameful humiliation that she can but endure.
He has seen these changes, has noted them with a hollow-hearted despair, but like most cowards who cannot bear to face the truth they have wrought, he has turned his face from them and told himself that they aren't as bad, as damning, as his smarting conscience deems them. Before he had drawn the bourbon curtain over his eyes and gone blind to everything but the echo of gunshots in his ears and the dusty, acrid taint of cordite on his hands and face, he had watched her creep warily through her home, fearful to tread too heavily, lest a hand snatch the ground from beneath her unsteady feet, watched her hunker on the couch and huddle in the wan yellow light of her designated corner of the living room and cling to her domesticity like Gollum crooning to his beloved precious deep in the belly of the Misty Mountains. No madness in her eyes, thank God, but something just as unsettling--a flat, calculating, reptilian gaze, as though she were measuring the distance between herself and the fragile flesh of his throat or belly. He had watched her adoration for him sour into confusion and sorrow and sullen contempt.
He had seen it all and done nothing, because it was easier, and because he was convinced that it had not yet grown too late, that he still had time to tend and mend the wounds he had inflicted. She was strong, and she would wait, he had told himself as his workload increased and his always-divided attention had drifted further and further from her ebbing light and closer to the grey and sepia and blood-smeared colors of his waking world. There would be a better time for the vacation he had promised, a more convenient time when the names of the dead didn't litter his desk like drifts of ash-smeared snow. But there never had been. One victory had been offset by another senseless loss, and for every name he had cleared from his desk, another had taken its place, and another, and another, until a week had become a month and a month had blurred into a year, and the IOUs had outstripped the "I love yous" in the lightless vault of her broken heart.
Oh, but he knows better now. The hour has grown very late, indeed, perhaps too late for him to save his neglected Wonderland, and like the white rabbit who had run to beat the devil and meet her at the other end of the winding rabbit hole, he can only play beat the clock and hope his furious queen remembers mercy before he loses his head. Rebecca has been slow and forebearing in her march to anger, but now that she has succumbed and tasted of it, she intends to let him have its fullest measure, to pour it over him like anointing oil gone rancid and black with flies. Why shouldn't she when he who pledged to love her best has shielded her from nothing, has left her for the piercing, glutting beaks of the carrion crows that tear her to pieces one disingenuous expression of gratitude for her sacrifice at a time? Her sacrifice. As if she'd ever had a choice in any of it. He had given her no choice, and she who had had no choice had chosen to hold her tongue because she had loved him in spite of her anger, but now the love that had bound her tongue is dying, and every curse she has ever swallowed is poised on a tongue honed sharp as a killing blade.
What? Hm? What? I've done everything you've ever asked of me. I've swallowed my pride and turned my head while you swanned around the city with a prissy debutante cunt on your arm and pissed on our marriage for a fistful of jewelery and a useless, paper 'atta boy' in your personnel file. I've supported whatever lie you've had to tell for the sake of your sworn duty, no matter how painful or humiliating, no matter how many scores it leaves on my soul. I've come when you called and left when I was no longer convenient. I've kissed the mouth that told me I'd done enough damage; I've held your hand through three IAB hearings in two years. I've surrendered my job, my independence, and my entire world so that you could be someone else's hero. And for four months, I've watched you mourn your dead whore in our home and never said a goddamn word. So what could you possibly ask of me now?
The words burn in his ears and bubble on his skin like sulfur and lye, an indictment hurled from the burning lips of an infuriated goddess who will brook no more excuses from the puny mortal who has paid but pitiful obeisance at her feet for these seven years, who will extend no more favors but mete out a righteous justice befitting his crime. And he can only cower and prostrate himself before her because she has spoken no falsehood, and because he knows that it is but a thimbleful of the rage that roils and seethes behind her lips like the restless, lifeless waters of a dead and poisoned sea. He is late, so very late now, and if he does not repair the divide he has so long ignored, then she will drown him with but a parting of her lips.
When Don Flack was still thirty, still treading carefully on the loose and shifting ground of Rebecca's slowly-mending graces, he had gifted his goddess a child, had conceived a son in the back of a departmental SUV. It was a gift he had not intended, but in which they had both reveled, and for a time, the sun had returned to his castle in the clouds and the light had returned to Rebecca's eyes. She had been uncharacteristically daunted by the task set before her, demanded of her small, frail body, and for a moment as she'd sat on the sofa, small and light and huddled in his embrace, she had doubted herself. He had kissed her hair and stroked her pinched, pale face and promised her that it would be all right, though he had been just as frightened. And then his goddess had lain on the ultrasound table with a useless sheet of half-ply butcher paper over her belly and a magic wand jammed between her spraddled, resisting legs and a grainy image on the oscillating screen. His goddess had looked upon the image, the castor-bean outline of the miracle that would become their son, and she had forgotten her fear. She had roused herself from her long sleep and accepted the charge lain before her with dignity and grace and a quiet glory that made his eyes prickle and throb with unshed tears. She had turned to him with the half-ply on her belly and the wand shoved indecorously up her twat and smiled. And then she had taken his hand and squeezed it, glory, glory, allelu, absolution at last. He had held on as tightly as he dared and told himself that he would be more careful, would be a more conscientious tender of the gifts that he'd been given.
When Don Flack was thirty-one, with five years of marriage and four weeks of 2008 behind him, he had sat behind his desk in the precinct and watched his heretofore unassuming wife draw the mantle of a warrior around her bony, sagging shoulders and murder a man with a point of her scrawny finger and the speed of a striking serpent. There had been no doubt of her godhood then, when she'd loomed over her fallen enemy and radiated a power that had made his mouth turn to ash and his knees turn to water. He'd sagged in his office chair with the sad remains of his anniversary grinder forgotten on the edge of his desk and beheld the face of his goddess in full splendor. Wan and thin and wet with tears, but her hair had been a golden diadem from which he could not tear his disbelieving gaze, and her eyes had blazed with a might beyond reckoning, far greater than the meager weapons with which he had thought to protect her.
She'd had four months of his unborn son in her belly that cold February evening, and yet he hadn't recognized her as she'd seized the body sprawled on the floor and shaken it like a terrier flaying a rat, fists clenched and eyes wild and belly tightening dangerously. Fury and hard angles and a raw power that had swirled around her like the anticipatory breath before a storm. He'd feared her in that moment, relearned the true meaning of awe, that unfortunate, emasculated word stripped of its glory and used to extol the virtues of energy bars and hair gels. He'd feared to touch her, lest the power rattling through her bones and surging through her veins like ungrounded electricity reduce him to bits of bone and smoldering ash and burnt hair, but he had also feared for his sleeping child, fragile and preoccupied with the business of becoming, and so he had swallowed his terror and sought out his wife inside the fury who had stolen her skin. And Rebecca, his obdurate changeling child, had answered.
He'd taken her home, knuckles white on the steering wheel and mind crowded with images of death rushing from her pointing finger in a flash of red and hissing from her mouth like Charon's lullaby, booming as thunder on the mountain, and sibilant, a blade drawn against a whetstone. That dreadful, alien word that had passed her lips with the terrible ease of long familiarity. The inexplicable gaping second mouth that had appeared below her attacker's chin and spilled his blood onto the floor of the precinct in a spreading crimson pool, the iron and cordite reek of it amid the heat of adrenaline and clustered bodies. The whiteness of his hair, a blond so light it had verged on silver, as though he'd been a child of midnight and moon dust. The faces of his fellow detectives, writ large with emotions that mirrored his own--confusion and fear and a primitive awe. The rustle of heavy, snow-dusted parkas as officers from a precinct of which he'd never heard had trooped through the stationhouse with sticks in their hands and snow on their shoulders. The hush that had fallen over the bullpen as two of them had disappeared into the captain's office. The thin, Hispanic officer who had introduced himself as Officer Tony Ramirez and interrogated his wife in a language he could not speak, could scarcely comprehend. Watching he and Rebecca speak had been dizzying, like eavesdropping on angels, and he'd fought a dull, tight-bellied nausea that had made his scar throb and burn and closed his eyes against a wave of vertigo.
What he'd remembered most on that interminable, solemn, silent ride home--what he still remembers--had been the faces of his fellow officers as they'd emerged, in ones and twos, from the captain's office. They'd been slack and bewildered, as though they'd glimpsed eternity behind the closed blinds and had surrendered their minds to the outstretched hands of a judging angel. They'd tugged absently at their clothes as though they had never seen them before and wished each other "Happy Thanksgiving" and "Merry Christmas" and "Happy New Year" and inquired after birthdays and anniversaries that had come and gone a season before. They'd moved with the drowsy slowness of people roused from deep and troubling dreams, and he had watched them in silent dread, a man thrust unawares into a dream of another's making. He'd looked to Rebecca for explanation and solace and a mirror of his own confusion, but Rebecca had not been there, only the strange, pitiless dybbuk that had borrowed her skin. His skin had prickled into hard knots of gooseflesh, and he'd fought the nigh-overwhelming urge to cram his knuckles into his mouth and flee to the sanity of the outside world, with the bums and the sidewalk preachers and the end-of-the-world evangelists in their suits of cardboard armor.
He'd learned to live with the truth he'd discovered that cold February night because he'd loved her fiercely, but it had terrified him, too, this new facet of his china doll. Everything he'd thought he'd known about her had been rudely redefined. Curves had become planes and angles had had become unyielding lines and every softness had become hard and cutting as flint beneath his groping hands. The topography of their relationship had turned upside down and inside out in the blink of an eye, and he could only cling to the certainty of his love for her and hope the world righted itself before he lost his grip.
His hopes had been answered in the end. She might not have needed him to protect her from the murderers and the rapists and the myriad horrors that lurked outside her doors, but she had needed him in other ways. She had still needed him to kiss her good morning when she staggered to the toilet with Morpheus' dreaming dust falling from her blearily-blinking eyes, and to card his fingers through her freshly-washed hair as he drank his coffee and flipped through the delivery of bills the night before. She'd still needed him to massage the knots of tension from her neck and shoulders at the end of a long day and whisper that he loved her while she splayed limply against his cushioning chest. She'd still needed him to clip her toenails and shave her sex with his old Remington, the guard set to its lowest setting and tufts of lightly-curling down drifting to the towel spread beneath her ass. She'd still needed him to consecrate her bare cunt with long, lazy strokes of his tongue, needed him to flick its practiced, wet blade against the swollen nub of her clit until she cried out and rose up beneath him, fingers tangled in his hair. She'd still needed him to enfold her in his arms when it was over, to keep the chilling sorrow of alone at bay. She had still needed him to love her.
And love her he had, blindly and wholeheartedly. For one precious season between her fourth month and her ninth, he had installed her upon her rightful throne as the undisputed queen of his heart. She had come first unequivocally, with neither peer nor rival for his attentions and affections, and she had blossomed, flourished along with the child in her belly. For once, he had been the Prince Charming she had believed him to be that long-ago day at St. Patrick's when she'd dangled one dainty foot over the riser of the snow-dusted front steps and trusted him to keep her from falling. She had rediscovered her lost and broken faith, and the fractures in her heart had begun to heal.
But he hadn't been perfect for long enough, and in the end, his china doll had shattered in his stupid, clumsy hands. Now, he's bleeding from a thousand wounds he never knew he had, and there isn't enough hope or willpower or make-up sex to make it stop. He's bleeding to death at his kitchen table, held upright by the desire to see her one last time before her red lightning flashes like overdue judgment and shatters him into a million pieces.
When Don Flack was still thirty-one and she was happy and in love and nine months gone with his firstborn child, the prince had stumbled from his pedestal and reclaimed his pauper's clothes. Heavy with child and never at ease with gravity's relentless tug, she had nearly fallen in the bathroom and only his reflexes and adrenaline-fueled grace had kept him from losing them both. Frozen in his improbable fencer's crouch with his heart lodged in his throat like a strangling clot and eyes fixed on her gravid belly, he had taken it into his mind to betray her, though that wasn't what his triphammering father's heart had called it. No creature is more adept at necessary delusion than a frightened man, and so, he had steadied her and helped her back into bed, and while she had slept beside him, trusting and swaddled in dreams of cradles and blankets and bassinets lined with blue bunting, he had silenced his conscience with images of his child's head jutting from between her blood-smeared thighs as she bled to death on the bathroom floor and he drowned in the ever-spreading pool of her blood or throttled on his umbilical cord. There in the bed, with her dreaming breath a sussurating rush in the humid, summer silence of their small bedroom, he had watched the steady rise and fall of her domed belly and plotted his treachery.
He had sprung his trap the next morning. She had resisted, but terror had made him ruthless, and he had spared no weapon in his campaign to keep her safe. He had pleaded and justified and issued husbandly fiats, and when each had failed, he had stooped to his cruelest tactic. He had raised the specter of death in the line of duty, had implied that if she refused to surrender her pride and spend the remainder of her pregnancy in the impersonal confines of the hospital, that way station for the dying, then she was exposing him to the risk of death by lowlife's bullet or the whicking, quicksilver bloodletting of a knife or the deadly flash of a straight razor across his jugular, that she would be the fatal distraction his mother had always believed her to be. He'd used her guilt and fear against her, indicted her for her pride, and he'd hated himself for it, had felt ugly and mean and unworthy of her, but enlightened civility had collapsed in the face of the biological imperative to protect his offspring and his mate, and he'd become a caveman. He'd broken her to save her, and he'd told himself that later, she would understand, when she was delivered of their son, and he slept, pink and healthy, in his bassinet. She would understand, and forgive him this trespass.
And Rebecca had heard his accusations and doomsday predictions and wept in terror and a child's naked misery, because she had loved him, and because, deep in her heart, she had believed the worst suppositions of her mother-in-law, who thought her a burden and a mistake made in a fit of noble, blind charity by her kindhearted, idealistic young son, her only son, who would save the world because he could not save his baby sister. She had raised her voice to heaven in protest, and when heaven's doors had remained shut against her, she had wiped her eyes and squared her shoulders and been the good wife one more time. She'd packed her suitcase and swallowed her fear and outrage and submitted to his paranoia, let him lead her from the safety of their apartment and pile her into the car like so much inconvenient bric-a-brac to be stored out of sight and out of mind until she was no longer such an imposition.
She had been stony and silent during the drive to the hospital, and the faceless, grasping child had stirred in his belly, had reached up and squeezed his guts with slick, burning fingers, and guilt had tasted like coffee and bile as he'd tried to distract her from his treachery with bright, empty chatter and the sad bribery of breakfast at a greasy spoon in exchange for her freedom. But Rebecca had never been easily swayed, and she had just shaken her head and clutched her suitcase as though it had contained the last remnants of her kinder life, and looking back now, with the unflinching clarity of hindsight, he thinks maybe it had. Maybe those clothes and those cheap sundries and the clutch of tattered, secondhand paperbacks had been mementos, artifacts from a dead life, a life before she knew that he could betray her so abjectly and finally. Here in the gloomy solitude of his kitchen, waiting for her key to turn in the lock and watching the clock and the lazy dance of the dust motes in the close, unclean air of an apartment in need of airing, the memories are clearer and sharper and cut so much deeper with no blood or flashing lights or screaming, vengeance-swearing criminals to distract him. He remembers now the expression in her eyes then, the anguished bleakness of a survivor returned to the place of her greatest torment. A survivor who knows there will be no more miracles.
Cont'd next post
Author:
laguera25Fandom: CSI:NY/HP
Rating: FRM
Pairing: Flack/OFC
SPOILERS: HP through HBP; CSI:NY through S6, especially "Pay Up" and "Cuckoo's Nest."
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events in the NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis.
All characters in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: Set immediately after "Skin" in the Flack/Stanhope crackverse.
When Don Flack was twenty-four, he'd met his wife on Thirty-Fourth Street. He'd quite literally run into her as he'd pursued a perp down the crowded sidewalk. He'd bellowed for people to get out of the way, dammit, and she'd tried, but her chair was slow and he'd been fast, and he'd run headlong into her, stumbling and staggering and sending her ass-over-teakettle onto the filthy pavement as he'd blundered on in search of his quarry. The collision had broken her wrist and left a deep, horizontal bruise across his thighs where quadricep had met titanium and plastic.
He'd been breathless then, winded and sweating and light-boned with adrenaline as he'd straddled his prey and wrestled him into cuffs that had glinted in the weak, winter sun. He'd spared little thought for her in those first hectic moments after the chase, but had thought instead of the dangerous, drawn-bowstring thrum of the man beneath him, the thrashing, impotent anger of a snared cur. The man would have wounded him if given the chance, would have bucked and twisted and sunk his rotten, junkie's teeth into his forearm in a final, futile act of defiance. The collar wasn't good until the perp was in the cage, and so he'd ignored the press and swell of the crowd around him and the low, furious mutter of suppressed pain and focused on the grotty, uncharitable business of survival.
It wasn't until later, when the suspect had been locked securely in the squad car and he'd been waiting for the adrenaline to ebb from his veins, that he'd begun to worry about the squawking blur that he'd trampled in his pursuit of justice. He'd stood on the sidewalk with his hands on his hips and surveyed the aftermath. Her wheelchair had lain in the center of the pavement, one wheel bent and the spokes a warped, flaccid muddle of useless steel. The gawkers that had gathered to watch the spectacle of the chase had begun to mill and drift like dissipating fog, and as he'd watched, a thin man with chapped cheeks and a grey, woolen overcoat had carelessly stepped over her chair as though it were of no more consequence than a crushed insect. It had looked flimsy and pathetic amid the indifferent bustle of the city, and guilt had slithered into his gut like the onset of nausea. He'd grimaced in regret and moved to set the chair to rights. It had sat, but badly, listing drunkenly on its warped wheel, and when he'd chanced an experimental roll, he'd been greeted by an anguished, atonal keening from the abused wheel.
She had been in the ambulance, small and vulpine between the two white-shirted paramedics who'd hovered over her and bombarded her with questions and prodded her with the invasive tools of their trade. Tired and disheveled, she'd been, pale and slumped, her golden hair tousled and framing a thin face white with pain and wan with exhaustion. Their eyes had met briefly as he'd peered into the ambulance, and he'd seen contempt and frustration.
He doesn't know why he went to the hospital that evening. He supposes he'd been driven by conscience, by the kerchief-wearing Boy Scout that lurked beneath his smartass New York skin. He'd become a cop to help people, to protect the weak and unwary from the ravenous, disease-jawed thugs who bullied and raped and murdered for the sheer, ugly pleasure of it. There had been other motives, of course--his father's vaunted legacy had loomed large over his childhood and influenced his boyhood dreaming, an unseen yet tangible force that had steered him down the inevitable, predestinate path to the academy and away from the sweeter, more innocent dreams of becoming the next Wolfgang Puck--but in the end, the choice had been his to make, and he'd made it because he'd wanted to be a light in a city of shadows and streets that led to nowhere and squalid, lonely nothingness. He'd wanted to be a knight in blue with a shield of gold, a protector of the kingdom, and of maidens even if they weren't the fairest in the land. He supposes he'd gone because knights didn't knock maidens from their chariots and leave them in the dust. Such was the way of the knave, and he'd been determined never to wear such an ignoble mantle.
So he'd gone to the hospital to apologize and retain his standing as a knight of good grace, to reassure himself that he was a good guy and not a thoughtless brute who trod on helpless damsels and left them to lick their wounds. He's sure that if he were ever to confess this to her, she would roll her eyes and laugh and leave the needling promise of her teeth on the delicate flesh of his heart with an acerbic barb. Or maybe she wouldn't be so delicate now; maybe in the shadow of Angell's death and all of the terrible things that have come tumbling after, she would be crueler, would bite, not to mark, but to rend and tear and bruise. Perhaps even break, tooth on bone and sinew pulled from muscle and marrow slurped with greasy, blood-flecked lips. He wouldn't be surprised. She is different now, and so is he, and so is everything else.
It had been stupid, absurd, really, to think of her as weak, but he hadn't known her then, hadn't understood the fierce heart that had beaten behind that fragile, birdbone chest. Then, he'd seen only her tiny body and rounded shoulders and the loose, madcap joints fashioned by a clumsy, idiot hand. He'd been just another ignorant fool who'd seen only the least of her, her flaws and her odd, non-Euclidean angles. It wasn't until later that he would come to his epiphany and behold the unlikely greatness of her, the undimmed glory hidden beneath the dirt and bitterness and unceasing rage that so often bound her to herself. That night, she'd been just another-hard luck soul in need of a helping hand.
He'd learned better, though, in the days and weeks that followed, when he'd called her to discuss reimbursement for the damage to her chair. He'd discovered a spine of tempered steel beneath that pale skin and a will to match, a stubbornness deep enough to propel her through the world's merciless waters. She'd had a brilliant mind and a rapier wit and a serrated tongue that could cleave through the bullshit with a single, disdainful snap of her jaws. She'd been a crystal chandelier in a tinpot outhouse, such a marvelous incongruity that he could only marvel, the receiver of the precinct phone tucked in the hollow of his shoulder while he doodled on a legal pad to give the impression of industry.
There had been an indefinable sweetness behind her craggy, aloof exterior, a sense of wonder that he had long counted as lost in this city of cynics and survivors. She'd hated society with the pucker-mouthed bitterness of the perpetually-wounded, but she'd loved the world and embraced its wonders, its miracles and its ironies. She could make him laugh until his stomach was sprung and hot, could seed humor into her wry musings with an expert's hand, sugar cast carelessly atop a field of ash. She had lost her innocence long ago, sloughed it as if it were a skin too tight for her warped bones, but she hadn't surrendered her hope. It had burned less brightly than her anger, but no less fiercely, and he'd been in awe of her.
Soon, he'd found reasons to call her from home, stretched on the couch they would later share, the ugly, brown sofa on which his wriggling infant son would one day shit with gummy, gleeful gusto. He'd called to hear her voice and to coax that elusive sweetness to the surface with a prospector's infinite patience, sifting carefully through the hard, stony sediment of her heart to find flecks of gold and diamond dust. And he'd found it, more than he'd ever expected, a rich, untapped vein of it that he suspects no one before him had seen, much less touched with wondering, reverent hands. She'd guarded it jealously at first, had hidden it behind the rapier and the barbs and the brutal frankness that willed her out of bed and marched her through the unceasing grind of her days with the jut-jawed defiance of the damned, but he could be stubborn, too, a trait he'd earned from his parents and their hard-scrabble Irish and Italian roots. His mother had been a tough Italian beauty who'd come up the hard way in the Bronx, working two jobs by fifteen and helping her own parents with the upbringing of her three younger siblings. His father had been a bull-headed shanty Irish boy from Yonkers with a smart mouth and a burning desire to wash the mealy, soapscum taste of watery potato soup from his mouth, and they'd raised children cut from the same cloth, tough and ambitious and smart enough to get where they wanted to go. He'd wanted her, and he'd pursued her with the same single-minded determination he'd applied to junior college and the academy.
Eventually, she'd let him catch her.
When Don Flack was still twenty-four, he'd fallen in love at a Yankees game, as going, going, gone as the Derek Jeter homerun that had arced high over the stadium wall and disappeared into the night. Wish I may, wish I might, he'd thought as he'd watched her watch the ball drift across the sky like a falling star, and he'd wished that she would love him, invite her into her secret garden and create an Eden with him there. He'd watched her watch the ball, and when it was gone, he'd kissed her, had tasted mustard and relish and sweetness on her tongue.
Going, going, gone.
When Don Flack was still twenty-four, he'd stolen her virginity, twisting and writhing atop the rumpled bedsheets of his narrow bachelor's bed. He'd claimed her with a grunt and a sigh, eyes screwed shut against the hot-bellied, delirious pleasure of it, and she'd gasped and mewled and gritted her teeth against the pain of tribute, and she'd bled on his sheets. Blood had been smeared on her thighs when they'd parted, and her sweat had been sticky on his thighs and the coarse thatch of hair between his legs. It had been a mingling, an exchange, the signature on an unspoken covenant. She was his, and he was hers. She'd lain with her legs parted, spraddle-legged and shivering, exposed and vulnerable and helpless, and for a moment as he'd looked down at her, he wondered what he'd done, if perhaps, he'd asked too much. But when the time had come to change the sheets, she'd helped him do it, had winced at the sting between her legs and moved gingerly, but she'd helped him all the same, his partner in the pleasure and in the dirty scut work of living, and he'd known as he'd watched her struggle to slip the sheet over the corner of the mattress that it was going to be okay. He'd helped her back into bed and soothed her shivering with kisses and caresses, and when she'd stilled and surrendered to sleep, he'd curled around her in the dark and felt her breath tickle his throat.
When Don Flack was twenty-five, he'd asked her to marry him. He'd sat across from her at Delmonico's and slid a small, velvet box across the white linen. His heart had been a timpani drum against his ribcage and his balls had been small, hot stones inside his pants. His sly, smart mouth had been suddenly stupid, and he'd mumbled and fumbled and bumbled his way through a proposal that had borne little resemblance to the one he'd practiced in his bathroom mirror, and then he'd lapsed into miserable silence, hands clammy and mouth dry and belly a knotted burlap sack beneath his flushed skin.
She had stared at the box that held his heart in silence, fettucine dangling from the tines of her fork, and then she'd put down her fork and picked up the box and wrestled it open with her spidery, palsied, recalcitrant hands. She'd surveyed the contents in silence, and for a terrible, swooning moment, he’d thought he’d miscalculated, misread the signs. Her eyes had been dark and her face had been white, and her breath had been a reedy whine.
“Is this what I think it is?” she’d asked, as though she dared not trust her eyes.
“Yeah, well, I just thought-,” he’d said, inarticulate when it had counted most, a bite of osso bucco a hard, dry pebble that threatened to lodge in his airway.
She had been fluent in his language even then, conversant in the tongue of a blue-collar kid with stars in his eyes and a worthless juco diploma lost in the jumble of his life. She had understood what his imbecile’s tongue couldn’t say, and she had smiled at him. The bright, feral child who trusted no one had trusted him, had pressed three cool fingers to his bumbling, burning lips and followed them with a kiss and a quiet, “Yes.”
He’d slipped the ring onto her finger and the check onto the table, and then he’d bade her follow him into the frigid February night. She’d followed him without a backward glance, and she’s followed him ever since, hand in hand and full of love’s unshakeable faith.
He wonders now if she regrets it, if perhaps she wishes she’d laid a trail of breadcrumbs to find her way back. He wonders if she lies in the dark and hates him for a liar. He wonders if she wishes she’d been smart enough to love someone else.
When Don Flack was twenty-six, he’d married her in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, smart and crisp in his dress blues and giddy inside his skin. She’d been lovely in her wedding dress, a china doll in white lace, and he’d marveled at her as they’d knelt before the altar and Father Carmichael. She’d knelt beside him despite the excruciating protests of her bony knees, lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line and blue eyes fixed on the cross above the altar as if to challenge God to deny her this moment of the sublime in an otherwise hard, ugly life. Her hand had been soft in his, but her spine had been ramrod straight. She’d been an angel unashamed in the presence of the Lord who had so thoughtlessly dashed her upon the earth, and he’d loved her with a ferocity that had teetered on the cusp of mania.
She’d hesitated when the father had asked if she would and did. Not long--a heartbeat and an indrawn breath--but long enough to squeeze the air from his chest and grey his vision at the edges. He'd frozen, sure that she had realized her mistake at the last instant and had decided to rescind her invitation to build his home inside her heart. He'd braced himself and waited for her to turn that defiant gaze on him, contempt and pity and recognition of her folly and relief that there was still time to retreat from the brink, but she had just stared at Father Carmichael, eyes wide and bewildered, a woman who had awakened from a pleasant daydream to find herself crouched before the jaws of a predatory beast.
He'd swallowed his triphammering heart and squeezed her hand, whether to awaken her from her nightmare or coax her over the precipice, he hadn't known. She'd startled and blinked and offered him a sidelong glance and a shy smile, and then she'd squared her shoulders and stepped over the precipice with an "I do" that had resounded through the cavernous, white-marble vault of the cathedral like the clarion of a bell. His insides had turned to wax and water and his lips to fire. He'd raised her veil and cupped her cheeks, which, for once, had been warm and rosy with happiness. He'd tilted her chin and bent his head, and there before God, His emissary, and five hundred people, he'd drunk deeply of her, his second hope and living font of grace unbidden.
When Don Flack was twenty-eight, he had nearly widowed her, traded the joyous white of her wedding gown for the austere black of mourning. It had been the last thing he'd intended to do that Sunday morning in May, when he'd slipped from their bed and her embrace and into his armor. He'd left her with a kiss and promised her that he'd be back soon. The next time he saw her, it had been eight days later and her heart had been as broken as his guts as she'd sat beside his hospital bed and held his limp hand to keep him from slipping into the cold, dark waters of eternity.
He thinks of that kiss often now, wishes he'd held it just a few seconds longer, had treasured it a little more. Maybe if he'd lingered, had taken the few precious seconds to cradle the thin cup of her skull in his hands and seek out the sweetness behind her teeth and beneath her tongue, if he'd kissed her as he'd meant it and not as duty had demanded it be, then he wouldn't be here now. Maybe that inconsequential delay would have meant that he would have missed his date with a plummeting Xerox machine. Maybe he would've gotten stuck in traffic, or maybe he would have been three steps behind Mac instead of ten ahead. If had had only kissed her as he ought, then he might have emerged with little more than ringing ears and a dirty face and skin scraped raw from the shrapnel of flying concrete. He might've come home to her with nothing more than dust in his mouth instead of the blood and poison and the cursed, too-sharp teeth with which he'd let the poison in.
When Don Flack was still twenty-eight, still a straw man with guts held together by thread and modern medicine, he had bitten the hand that had reached for him, bitten through flesh and blood to scrape bone and score raw, bleeding wounds in her tenderest places. He hadn't meant to hurt, only to deflect, to stay the constantly-grasping, hands that had clutched his arms or slithered around his neck or fluttered around his wounds like a panicked hummingbird, cool and solicitous and tender and strangling as ivy. He'd wanted peace, just five goddamned minutes to let his body be his own, to slip away from the gnawing pain of internal reconstruction.
But he'd been pain-rabid and tired and frightened, and the nip he'd intended had become a mindless snap of jaw. He'd had the fortune of the damned that miserable, weltering summer, and his teeth had battened onto her deepest wound, had tasted the sweet, high, pork-fat rot of her insecurity, the ugly, rancid meat of her loneliness and shame and heartbroken fear.
"Why don't you entertain yourself for a while? You've done enough damage," he'd snarled, exasperated and breathless with the pain she'd inflicted with an errant touch of her hand. Hurt and tired and cat-shit mean and possessed of the shameful urge to spread the wealth.
And his china doll had fractured, suddenly soft and frangible beneath her skin. He hadn't heard it, the grinding shift of grit and porcelain shards refashioning themselves into a new, unimagined whole, but seen it. It had been in the stiffness of her body, the shocked, inflexible spasticity of her arms as she'd fought the urge to curl them tight against her chest, the shriveled, atrophied forelimbs of a velociraptor. In the set of her jaw and the dimness of her eyes. Something vital and precious had failed catastrophically in that moment, had shorted and snapped and collapsed into rubble and left nothing but dust and negative space in its wake. It should've been fatal, should have brought her to her knees there beside the bed, but his china doll was greater than the material of her forging, and she had found the strength to drag herself away and leave him to his petty victory and his coveted rest.
He hadn't realized what he'd done, of course, not then. He'd been too tired and drugged and enamored of his righteous pique to notice, too drunk with pain and Vicodin to see that the fracture was no mere hairline fracture to be buffed away with an apology and salved with kisses and a candlelit dinner at Salvatore's, with the music slow and low and the garlic heavy and a bustling Italian nona in the miniscule restaurant kitchen, but a gaping fault that reached its jagged, pernicious fingers through flesh and bone and into her battle-scarred heart. It wasn't until later, when his belated apology had fallen on indifferent ears and the days and weeks and months had stretched into brittle silence that he'd begun to comprehend the extent of the damage, and when he had, he'd been rendered stupid and impotent in the face of it, boneless and powerless and inert, a blast-rattled survivor gazing gormlessly into the crater left behind by a speeding meteor.
He had tried to mend the damage then, but it was too late; the fracture had calcified and set and trapped the hurt inside, where it had simmered and festered and darkened her eyes. Her lips and her arms and her cunt had forgiven him, and maybe her heart had, too, but it has certainly never forgotten. It quails at the slightest shadow, and she freezes, eyes wide and teeth bared, ready to shut him out before he can hurt her again with his promises that break as soon as they leave his mouth, fragile as glass blown from sugar sand. The past looms large in her memory, and he has done precious little to make her forget it.
He knows now that he waited too long to salve that wound. He should have apologized the instant the words left his mouth, neutralized them with an “I’m sorry. I love you.” He should have dragged himself out of bed and pursued her into the living room, teeth clenched against the agonized, diseased-gum throb in his mending guts and swallowed his pain as she had swallowed hers for eight long days and seven long nights. He should have reached for her, drawn her in, and never mind if she snapped at him in a moment of blind heartache, returned a portion of the favor with a flash of teeth and cutting tongue. He should have loved her until her rage was spent, loved her anyway. It was how she had loved him until then, until that irrevocable moment when he’d chosen himself over her, let go of her hand and watched her drift away.
If he could go back now, he would, but he can’t, and so the knowledge is useless. It burns and shifts in his belly, a fragment of masonry that Dr. Singh’s keen eyes and nimbly-plucking fingers missed. Sometimes, when he is alone, in the stationhouse bathroom or crammed into a squad car and watching some derelict storefront for signs of the human cockroaches that skitter within its crumbling walls, he feels it stir, a momentary flutter behind his navel that reminds him of his son’s quickening inside her belly, a purposeful, exploratory tap beneath the skin. It’s the nucleus of something terrible, as alive and aware as his son had been as he’d bobbed and drifted in the warm, sheltering waters of his mother’s womb. He can’t see its face. It’s turned from him, the dark side of the moon, but he can see its soul, and that’s worse. He would tear it out if he could, reach inside himself and yank it out by the roots, but it’s too late for that. It’s too far gone, and he’s too afraid.
He wonders what it will look like when he finally sees its face. Part of him thinks he already knows, thinks he saw its profile in the dim, infernal light of a boiler room where a bad man went to die, saw its eyes in the glare of the muzzle flash in the instant before his bullet slammed into Simon Cade’s bastard, Jess-murdering head and left flash burns on his soul that still prickle and smart and burn even though he bathes them in Beam and the cold, silver waters of the moon.
Sweet child o’ mine, he thinks, and he grimaces as his belly cramps and rolls, trying, he supposes, to wrap its strangling fingers around his heart.
When Don Flack was twenty-nine, he had sat at this very table and poured salt into the wound that had never healed. He had hated himself for it, but he had done it all the same, because he was a knight in blue, and his kingdom had called him to arms. He had sat in this very chair with a fork in one hand and a knife in the other and sunk the latter into her unsuspecting back. He can still remember the way she’d looked at him when he’d opened his mouth and slid the knife home, the terrible stillness when she’d finally understood.
He’d expelled her from the Eden he’d offered her when he’d slipped a small, golden band onto her trembling finger, turned her out and barred the gate against her in the name of jewelry stolen from rich, Manhattan socialites who were too busy to miss the things they’d lost. He’d turned her out because the department asked him to, and because he’d been too much a coward then to refuse. He’d only been back on the job five months when the order came down, and he’d been afraid that if he turned down the assignment, then the brass would mark it as weakness and him as damaged goods and quietly shuffle him off the promotion grid. Disappointing them had been the greater of two terrors for him then, and God, that makes him want to laugh and cry at the same time, makes his gut roil with a shame that tastes like Beam and blood.
She, he’d told himself as he’d stepped out with a female undercover on his arm and ground his love’s heart beneath his heel with every traitorous step, would forgive him. The job wouldn’t. No choice, he’d reassured himself as he’d eaten shrimp canapes and oysters Rockefeller off polished silver trays and tried not to think of his apartment, empty and dark and dead as a deconsecrated church without her to light it. There had been no choice.
Oh, but there had been a choice. Always. He’d just been too much of a coward and a selfish bastard to make it. He’d gone on swilling hundred-dollar wine and dusting his skin with designer gowns and left her with a knife in her back and no place to crawl inside and lick the wound. He would laugh if it didn’t hurt so much.
She had been the one with no choice, and she had gone without a word, gone to her exile while he’d slept. She’d left not a trace of blood behind, had held in her guts until she was too far away to stain him. She had left only a single word scrawled on a black-and-white photograph and a letter entrusted to a witless hotel desk clerk. He's not sure which had hurt worse, the letter, redolent with sorrow and confusion and hurt and a love so deep it cut his insides, or that single, scrawled word, an open-mouthed howl of rage that even she could not contain. The letter had driven him to drink and the roof of their building, where he had jumped rope until his knees had throbbed and burned and screamed in sympathy, ground glass in his joints, but the word has never left him. It burns at the base of his brain like an incipient tumor, and sometimes, he sees it when he sits on the edge of the bed in the middle of the night and watches Rebecca sleep, too afraid to touch her, lest he leave yet another bruise. It flutters behind his eyelids like a dust mote and etches itself into the random tussocks and whorls of bedsheet. It scores and brands and sticks to his skin like a nettle, burrows deeper with every move he makes. He'd thought it meant for another, then, that terrible word, with its indictment and its hatred, but after last night, he wonders. Wonders and aches and wishes he'd been more careful with the miraculous gift he'd been given.
She had cried out only once, and then only because he'd asked more of a heart already straining beneath the burden he had asked it to bear. It had been a cry, not of rage and defiance, but of simply agony, of fragmenting bone and splintering heart, of blood oozing between clutching fingers and teeth stained plum with blood and lungs that cannot breathe with the weight of the world on their encapsulating chest.
You promised, she'd breathed into the phone, returned to the simple fairness of childhood in her disappointment. You promised me. And then when he'd remained sadly, steadfastly resolute in the face of her hurt, buffered from the stark, naked ugliness of it by the mercy of distance, you bastard. The dull, nasal whine of the broken connection in his ear, a child not too proud to cry.
And he had promised, had sat and this very table with steak cooling between them like a body and held her hands and told her that it wouldn't take long. Two weeks top, and then they'd take that vacation that he'd been promising for years and on which he'd never delivered. Just two weeks of spitting on the most sacred vows he had ever made in exchange for ten rushed days in whatever pisspot hotel and resort his ever-dwindling civil servant's salary could afford. She hadn't wanted the trade, had turned her face from it like a child from the bitterest of medicines, but in the end, she had opened wide and swallowed it down because she was a good wife, and because by then, she had known that she could expect no better, and even a mouthful of gall was better than the yawning nothing he so often offered her.
He had overestimated his skills, had been too stupid and too brash, and two weeks had spun into one hundred and seven days. One hundred and seven days adrift, with only her rage and her determination to bind her. One hundred and seven days of tears that he hadn't been there to wipe away, and Rebecca, that unearthly child of no wasted motion, had simply let them run. By the time he'd crept to the airport with his heart and a bouquet of wilting flowers in his sweating fist, they had carved deep grooves around her eyes and mouth and caused her mouth to buckle. She'd been bent and haggard beneath the weight of those one hundred and seven days, and when she'd looked at him as she'd rolled grimly down the concourse, she'd seen not her loving and remorseful husband, but a man come to lay another burden across her trembling, broken shoulders.
She said she'd forgiven him, had said it with lips and tongue and teeth and the greedy, lascivious, wet suction of her mouth as she'd hollowed her cheeks and swirled her tongue around his bucking, blindly-thrusting prick in a motel room that had stunk of musty sheets and melting filament and wet phonebook. Because even then he could not take her home and reinstall her upon her domestic throne; he had wanted to, had longed for it with a desperation that had made his muscles ache and throb and turn to taut cords beneath his flushed skin, but the department had insisted he stay the course, remain in the yoke it had so rudely thrust upon him even if he died in it, even if everything good and sweet in his dirty, grimy, monochromatic life of blood and bodies and squirming dead things died in it. He had stolen that night from its copper-toothed jaws in an act of petty defiance, had cradled her to himself until the sweat had dried on their bodies, had pressed his nose into the golden fall of her hair to smell clean skin and peaches and the heady odor of freshly-scythed wheat. And when sleep had taken her into its clutching depths and hidden his shame and cowardice from those lovely blue eyes, he'd taken up the yoke and abandoned her a second time.
And she had forgiven him a second time, had said so by the same means in their bed three weeks later. She had imparted her forgiveness with her cunning mouth and cool, splay-fingered hands and the wet, sucking warmth of her spasming, spastic cunt. She had kissed him and loved him, and she had cried out with a sound not born of pain, had shuddered and gasped and exacted what penance she would with short-clipped nails that raised red weals down his back. Forty lashes rendered in lines of four and soothed with her pliant, drowsy mouth.
She had forgiven him, perhaps, but she has never healed, never regained the sense of sure and equal footing that she had enjoyed in this apartment once upon a time, before his superiors had come with their badges and their self-importance and their need to play the political game and kicked her beloved castle to dust. Before he had shown his belly and betrayed her and stood aside to let them do it. Once upon a time, she had considered these walls, drab and cramped and insufficient to her needs as they are, her home, the secret place that the cruelties of the world could not violate with their thieving fingers and rapacious, devouring jaws, the one spot of cement earth that his job could not sully with its endless bowing, withering need. Once upon a time, she had thought him worthy of her devotion, a son of Helios and a prince among men. She had been proven wrong on both counts, and the knowledge had lain heavily upon her, had made her stumble where once she had sat tall and proud, to flinch at the rap upon the front door and to shy from his touch whenever it comes with tidings of which she is sure she cannot be glad, with another shameful humiliation that she can but endure.
He has seen these changes, has noted them with a hollow-hearted despair, but like most cowards who cannot bear to face the truth they have wrought, he has turned his face from them and told himself that they aren't as bad, as damning, as his smarting conscience deems them. Before he had drawn the bourbon curtain over his eyes and gone blind to everything but the echo of gunshots in his ears and the dusty, acrid taint of cordite on his hands and face, he had watched her creep warily through her home, fearful to tread too heavily, lest a hand snatch the ground from beneath her unsteady feet, watched her hunker on the couch and huddle in the wan yellow light of her designated corner of the living room and cling to her domesticity like Gollum crooning to his beloved precious deep in the belly of the Misty Mountains. No madness in her eyes, thank God, but something just as unsettling--a flat, calculating, reptilian gaze, as though she were measuring the distance between herself and the fragile flesh of his throat or belly. He had watched her adoration for him sour into confusion and sorrow and sullen contempt.
He had seen it all and done nothing, because it was easier, and because he was convinced that it had not yet grown too late, that he still had time to tend and mend the wounds he had inflicted. She was strong, and she would wait, he had told himself as his workload increased and his always-divided attention had drifted further and further from her ebbing light and closer to the grey and sepia and blood-smeared colors of his waking world. There would be a better time for the vacation he had promised, a more convenient time when the names of the dead didn't litter his desk like drifts of ash-smeared snow. But there never had been. One victory had been offset by another senseless loss, and for every name he had cleared from his desk, another had taken its place, and another, and another, until a week had become a month and a month had blurred into a year, and the IOUs had outstripped the "I love yous" in the lightless vault of her broken heart.
Oh, but he knows better now. The hour has grown very late, indeed, perhaps too late for him to save his neglected Wonderland, and like the white rabbit who had run to beat the devil and meet her at the other end of the winding rabbit hole, he can only play beat the clock and hope his furious queen remembers mercy before he loses his head. Rebecca has been slow and forebearing in her march to anger, but now that she has succumbed and tasted of it, she intends to let him have its fullest measure, to pour it over him like anointing oil gone rancid and black with flies. Why shouldn't she when he who pledged to love her best has shielded her from nothing, has left her for the piercing, glutting beaks of the carrion crows that tear her to pieces one disingenuous expression of gratitude for her sacrifice at a time? Her sacrifice. As if she'd ever had a choice in any of it. He had given her no choice, and she who had had no choice had chosen to hold her tongue because she had loved him in spite of her anger, but now the love that had bound her tongue is dying, and every curse she has ever swallowed is poised on a tongue honed sharp as a killing blade.
What? Hm? What? I've done everything you've ever asked of me. I've swallowed my pride and turned my head while you swanned around the city with a prissy debutante cunt on your arm and pissed on our marriage for a fistful of jewelery and a useless, paper 'atta boy' in your personnel file. I've supported whatever lie you've had to tell for the sake of your sworn duty, no matter how painful or humiliating, no matter how many scores it leaves on my soul. I've come when you called and left when I was no longer convenient. I've kissed the mouth that told me I'd done enough damage; I've held your hand through three IAB hearings in two years. I've surrendered my job, my independence, and my entire world so that you could be someone else's hero. And for four months, I've watched you mourn your dead whore in our home and never said a goddamn word. So what could you possibly ask of me now?
The words burn in his ears and bubble on his skin like sulfur and lye, an indictment hurled from the burning lips of an infuriated goddess who will brook no more excuses from the puny mortal who has paid but pitiful obeisance at her feet for these seven years, who will extend no more favors but mete out a righteous justice befitting his crime. And he can only cower and prostrate himself before her because she has spoken no falsehood, and because he knows that it is but a thimbleful of the rage that roils and seethes behind her lips like the restless, lifeless waters of a dead and poisoned sea. He is late, so very late now, and if he does not repair the divide he has so long ignored, then she will drown him with but a parting of her lips.
When Don Flack was still thirty, still treading carefully on the loose and shifting ground of Rebecca's slowly-mending graces, he had gifted his goddess a child, had conceived a son in the back of a departmental SUV. It was a gift he had not intended, but in which they had both reveled, and for a time, the sun had returned to his castle in the clouds and the light had returned to Rebecca's eyes. She had been uncharacteristically daunted by the task set before her, demanded of her small, frail body, and for a moment as she'd sat on the sofa, small and light and huddled in his embrace, she had doubted herself. He had kissed her hair and stroked her pinched, pale face and promised her that it would be all right, though he had been just as frightened. And then his goddess had lain on the ultrasound table with a useless sheet of half-ply butcher paper over her belly and a magic wand jammed between her spraddled, resisting legs and a grainy image on the oscillating screen. His goddess had looked upon the image, the castor-bean outline of the miracle that would become their son, and she had forgotten her fear. She had roused herself from her long sleep and accepted the charge lain before her with dignity and grace and a quiet glory that made his eyes prickle and throb with unshed tears. She had turned to him with the half-ply on her belly and the wand shoved indecorously up her twat and smiled. And then she had taken his hand and squeezed it, glory, glory, allelu, absolution at last. He had held on as tightly as he dared and told himself that he would be more careful, would be a more conscientious tender of the gifts that he'd been given.
When Don Flack was thirty-one, with five years of marriage and four weeks of 2008 behind him, he had sat behind his desk in the precinct and watched his heretofore unassuming wife draw the mantle of a warrior around her bony, sagging shoulders and murder a man with a point of her scrawny finger and the speed of a striking serpent. There had been no doubt of her godhood then, when she'd loomed over her fallen enemy and radiated a power that had made his mouth turn to ash and his knees turn to water. He'd sagged in his office chair with the sad remains of his anniversary grinder forgotten on the edge of his desk and beheld the face of his goddess in full splendor. Wan and thin and wet with tears, but her hair had been a golden diadem from which he could not tear his disbelieving gaze, and her eyes had blazed with a might beyond reckoning, far greater than the meager weapons with which he had thought to protect her.
She'd had four months of his unborn son in her belly that cold February evening, and yet he hadn't recognized her as she'd seized the body sprawled on the floor and shaken it like a terrier flaying a rat, fists clenched and eyes wild and belly tightening dangerously. Fury and hard angles and a raw power that had swirled around her like the anticipatory breath before a storm. He'd feared her in that moment, relearned the true meaning of awe, that unfortunate, emasculated word stripped of its glory and used to extol the virtues of energy bars and hair gels. He'd feared to touch her, lest the power rattling through her bones and surging through her veins like ungrounded electricity reduce him to bits of bone and smoldering ash and burnt hair, but he had also feared for his sleeping child, fragile and preoccupied with the business of becoming, and so he had swallowed his terror and sought out his wife inside the fury who had stolen her skin. And Rebecca, his obdurate changeling child, had answered.
He'd taken her home, knuckles white on the steering wheel and mind crowded with images of death rushing from her pointing finger in a flash of red and hissing from her mouth like Charon's lullaby, booming as thunder on the mountain, and sibilant, a blade drawn against a whetstone. That dreadful, alien word that had passed her lips with the terrible ease of long familiarity. The inexplicable gaping second mouth that had appeared below her attacker's chin and spilled his blood onto the floor of the precinct in a spreading crimson pool, the iron and cordite reek of it amid the heat of adrenaline and clustered bodies. The whiteness of his hair, a blond so light it had verged on silver, as though he'd been a child of midnight and moon dust. The faces of his fellow detectives, writ large with emotions that mirrored his own--confusion and fear and a primitive awe. The rustle of heavy, snow-dusted parkas as officers from a precinct of which he'd never heard had trooped through the stationhouse with sticks in their hands and snow on their shoulders. The hush that had fallen over the bullpen as two of them had disappeared into the captain's office. The thin, Hispanic officer who had introduced himself as Officer Tony Ramirez and interrogated his wife in a language he could not speak, could scarcely comprehend. Watching he and Rebecca speak had been dizzying, like eavesdropping on angels, and he'd fought a dull, tight-bellied nausea that had made his scar throb and burn and closed his eyes against a wave of vertigo.
What he'd remembered most on that interminable, solemn, silent ride home--what he still remembers--had been the faces of his fellow officers as they'd emerged, in ones and twos, from the captain's office. They'd been slack and bewildered, as though they'd glimpsed eternity behind the closed blinds and had surrendered their minds to the outstretched hands of a judging angel. They'd tugged absently at their clothes as though they had never seen them before and wished each other "Happy Thanksgiving" and "Merry Christmas" and "Happy New Year" and inquired after birthdays and anniversaries that had come and gone a season before. They'd moved with the drowsy slowness of people roused from deep and troubling dreams, and he had watched them in silent dread, a man thrust unawares into a dream of another's making. He'd looked to Rebecca for explanation and solace and a mirror of his own confusion, but Rebecca had not been there, only the strange, pitiless dybbuk that had borrowed her skin. His skin had prickled into hard knots of gooseflesh, and he'd fought the nigh-overwhelming urge to cram his knuckles into his mouth and flee to the sanity of the outside world, with the bums and the sidewalk preachers and the end-of-the-world evangelists in their suits of cardboard armor.
He'd learned to live with the truth he'd discovered that cold February night because he'd loved her fiercely, but it had terrified him, too, this new facet of his china doll. Everything he'd thought he'd known about her had been rudely redefined. Curves had become planes and angles had had become unyielding lines and every softness had become hard and cutting as flint beneath his groping hands. The topography of their relationship had turned upside down and inside out in the blink of an eye, and he could only cling to the certainty of his love for her and hope the world righted itself before he lost his grip.
His hopes had been answered in the end. She might not have needed him to protect her from the murderers and the rapists and the myriad horrors that lurked outside her doors, but she had needed him in other ways. She had still needed him to kiss her good morning when she staggered to the toilet with Morpheus' dreaming dust falling from her blearily-blinking eyes, and to card his fingers through her freshly-washed hair as he drank his coffee and flipped through the delivery of bills the night before. She'd still needed him to massage the knots of tension from her neck and shoulders at the end of a long day and whisper that he loved her while she splayed limply against his cushioning chest. She'd still needed him to clip her toenails and shave her sex with his old Remington, the guard set to its lowest setting and tufts of lightly-curling down drifting to the towel spread beneath her ass. She'd still needed him to consecrate her bare cunt with long, lazy strokes of his tongue, needed him to flick its practiced, wet blade against the swollen nub of her clit until she cried out and rose up beneath him, fingers tangled in his hair. She'd still needed him to enfold her in his arms when it was over, to keep the chilling sorrow of alone at bay. She had still needed him to love her.
And love her he had, blindly and wholeheartedly. For one precious season between her fourth month and her ninth, he had installed her upon her rightful throne as the undisputed queen of his heart. She had come first unequivocally, with neither peer nor rival for his attentions and affections, and she had blossomed, flourished along with the child in her belly. For once, he had been the Prince Charming she had believed him to be that long-ago day at St. Patrick's when she'd dangled one dainty foot over the riser of the snow-dusted front steps and trusted him to keep her from falling. She had rediscovered her lost and broken faith, and the fractures in her heart had begun to heal.
But he hadn't been perfect for long enough, and in the end, his china doll had shattered in his stupid, clumsy hands. Now, he's bleeding from a thousand wounds he never knew he had, and there isn't enough hope or willpower or make-up sex to make it stop. He's bleeding to death at his kitchen table, held upright by the desire to see her one last time before her red lightning flashes like overdue judgment and shatters him into a million pieces.
When Don Flack was still thirty-one and she was happy and in love and nine months gone with his firstborn child, the prince had stumbled from his pedestal and reclaimed his pauper's clothes. Heavy with child and never at ease with gravity's relentless tug, she had nearly fallen in the bathroom and only his reflexes and adrenaline-fueled grace had kept him from losing them both. Frozen in his improbable fencer's crouch with his heart lodged in his throat like a strangling clot and eyes fixed on her gravid belly, he had taken it into his mind to betray her, though that wasn't what his triphammering father's heart had called it. No creature is more adept at necessary delusion than a frightened man, and so, he had steadied her and helped her back into bed, and while she had slept beside him, trusting and swaddled in dreams of cradles and blankets and bassinets lined with blue bunting, he had silenced his conscience with images of his child's head jutting from between her blood-smeared thighs as she bled to death on the bathroom floor and he drowned in the ever-spreading pool of her blood or throttled on his umbilical cord. There in the bed, with her dreaming breath a sussurating rush in the humid, summer silence of their small bedroom, he had watched the steady rise and fall of her domed belly and plotted his treachery.
He had sprung his trap the next morning. She had resisted, but terror had made him ruthless, and he had spared no weapon in his campaign to keep her safe. He had pleaded and justified and issued husbandly fiats, and when each had failed, he had stooped to his cruelest tactic. He had raised the specter of death in the line of duty, had implied that if she refused to surrender her pride and spend the remainder of her pregnancy in the impersonal confines of the hospital, that way station for the dying, then she was exposing him to the risk of death by lowlife's bullet or the whicking, quicksilver bloodletting of a knife or the deadly flash of a straight razor across his jugular, that she would be the fatal distraction his mother had always believed her to be. He'd used her guilt and fear against her, indicted her for her pride, and he'd hated himself for it, had felt ugly and mean and unworthy of her, but enlightened civility had collapsed in the face of the biological imperative to protect his offspring and his mate, and he'd become a caveman. He'd broken her to save her, and he'd told himself that later, she would understand, when she was delivered of their son, and he slept, pink and healthy, in his bassinet. She would understand, and forgive him this trespass.
And Rebecca had heard his accusations and doomsday predictions and wept in terror and a child's naked misery, because she had loved him, and because, deep in her heart, she had believed the worst suppositions of her mother-in-law, who thought her a burden and a mistake made in a fit of noble, blind charity by her kindhearted, idealistic young son, her only son, who would save the world because he could not save his baby sister. She had raised her voice to heaven in protest, and when heaven's doors had remained shut against her, she had wiped her eyes and squared her shoulders and been the good wife one more time. She'd packed her suitcase and swallowed her fear and outrage and submitted to his paranoia, let him lead her from the safety of their apartment and pile her into the car like so much inconvenient bric-a-brac to be stored out of sight and out of mind until she was no longer such an imposition.
She had been stony and silent during the drive to the hospital, and the faceless, grasping child had stirred in his belly, had reached up and squeezed his guts with slick, burning fingers, and guilt had tasted like coffee and bile as he'd tried to distract her from his treachery with bright, empty chatter and the sad bribery of breakfast at a greasy spoon in exchange for her freedom. But Rebecca had never been easily swayed, and she had just shaken her head and clutched her suitcase as though it had contained the last remnants of her kinder life, and looking back now, with the unflinching clarity of hindsight, he thinks maybe it had. Maybe those clothes and those cheap sundries and the clutch of tattered, secondhand paperbacks had been mementos, artifacts from a dead life, a life before she knew that he could betray her so abjectly and finally. Here in the gloomy solitude of his kitchen, waiting for her key to turn in the lock and watching the clock and the lazy dance of the dust motes in the close, unclean air of an apartment in need of airing, the memories are clearer and sharper and cut so much deeper with no blood or flashing lights or screaming, vengeance-swearing criminals to distract him. He remembers now the expression in her eyes then, the anguished bleakness of a survivor returned to the place of her greatest torment. A survivor who knows there will be no more miracles.
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