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Title: Danse Macabre 16/17
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
laguera25
Fandom(s): HP/CSI:NY
Rating: FRAO
Pairing: Don Flack/OFC
Spoilers: S1, S2, and S3; HP to Book 6
Disclaimer: All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.
A/N: One more to go. God knows if it will be posted here because Of LJ's lunacy; unless there is a clear explanation of LJ's new content policies and suspension/deletion procedures within 24 hours, I will be picking up stakes and moving to another blogging site. Stay tuned. Frankly, given LJ's egregious conduct throughout this sordid affair, I am not hopeful.
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII Part IX Part X Part XI Part XII Part XIII Part XIV Part XV
He checked the apartment twice to be sure, moved from room to room with methodical precision on legs that moved only because the motion was ingrained by muscle memory and years of training. His empty fingers curled around the grip of a pistol he did not hold, and his tongue was hot and small on the floor of his mouth, a dry pebble that threatened to choke him each time he swallowed. He ended where he had begun, standing in his socked feet in the doorway of the room that served as Rebecca's den of numbers.
The room was gloomy in the pre-dawn light, and it occurred to him that this was how a room looked when its dearest and most frequent occupant was no more, reduced to memories and two-dimensional photographs already beginning to fade. He had seen it a thousand times in the living rooms and kitchens of widows and sudden orphans. Absence took on a weight of its own in the houses of the unexpected dead.
It was the way Diana's room looked after she was gone, Gavin observed inside his head, gruff and tender all at once. The night she died, you couldn't sleep; every time you closed your eyes, you found yourself inside the Whisper House, tuggin' on her frozen arm in a bid to snatch her from the snappin' jaws of that damn pile. But she wouldn't come. She was rooted to that filthy floor and starin' into the dark with eyes like covered mirrors. She was already gone, but you didn't know that, didn't want to know, so you pulled until the dream carried you onto the lawn and left you on your hands and knees in the wet, cold grass, snivelin' and pukin' and starin' into the face of your father.
Sleeplessness was better than lookin' into them cold, dead eyes, so you opened your eyes wide and stared at the ceilin'. That was okay until you started seein' your sister's face in the darkness above your bed. It twisted itself into shape from the sparse light from the buildin's across the street and the hard, spidery fingers of the trees in the backyard. It came and went, like she was playin' one last game of peek-a-boo before childhood ended and forever began. Seein' her made your chest ache and filled you with a longin' that burned like sickness in your gut. You wanted to reach up and touch her face when you saw it, fill the cup'a your palm with its dark cheek, but you were afraid, 'cause you knew it would disappear the second you tried, fragile as the hope that made it, and you didn't wanna be disappointed.
You saw her in other places in your room, too. You thought she was hunkered at the foot of your bed, rocked back on her haunches with her arms dangling loosely between her thighs. You thought she was watchin' you, and that any minute, she was gonna open her mouth and eat the night. You knew that when she did, her teeth would be long, narrow needles and gleam silver in the faint light. You held your breath and waited for a cool, fleshless hand to dart out and seize your ankle, the better to drag you under. If she caught you, you would wake up inside her coffin, facedown in the liner with her death in your nostril.
You left your ankle exposed just in case. You wanted to go with her, even if she was damned to ride the rivers of Hell. Home was wherever she was, and Hell was more than you deserved anyway.
She never grabbed your ankle because she wasn't there. The shadow at the foot of your bed was your dirty clothes and wishful thinkin'. So you swung your feet over the side of the bed, a lure to coax her from under the bed in case she'd decided to play hide and seek, too. You whispered her name through a wad of phlegm in your throat and willed her to come out, come out wherever she was.
Ollie, Ollie oxen free, you murmured to the floor, and watched your feet with feverish, tear-stained hope. Ollie, Ollie oxen free, Di.
But she never came out of hiding, and even in grief, your patience wasn't inexhaustible, so you gathered your pillow and a blanket and padded across the hall to her room and stood on the threshold just like now, in your socked feet with tears and weariness in your eyes. Your heartbeat vibrated against your ribcage and made your vision blur and waver at the edges. You wanted to sit down and rock back and forth, but you knew that if you did, you'd never regain your feet. You'd just sit there until morning, when either your ma or pop shambled upstairs and found you on the floor like a pillar of salt. So you stayed upright with your beddin' clutched to your chest like a goddamned teddy bear.
You'd planned on goin' right in and settlin' into her bed, or, if that knife cut too deep or too close, beddin' down on the floor beside it like you did when you were kids. You used'ta drape a sheet over chairs and call it a tent. You went campin'. Sometimes, you slept on the floor because it was warmer on those deep winter night when the furnace went to shit and the cold cut like piano wire across exposed skin. It was warmer heartbeat to heartbeat under the flannel blankets your Pop brought up from the basement. It was safer, sweeter, and you did it as often as you could until circumstance and basic biology said you couldn't.
Sometimes, you'd slept on the floor together to keep her night terrors under control. They started as soon as she was old enough to dream, and she could raise hackles with her screams. Your folks tried everythin'-your old man, who thought his fatherin' responsibilities ended at the crotch of his undershorts, walked her across the floor of the nursery for hours on end, makin' up nonsense nursery rhymes and recitin' baseballs stats while he bounced her in his arms-but she just kept screamin', chubby toddler fingers clawin' at the collar of his undershirt. She'd scream until she puked sometimes, and then your ma would lift her from your father's arms and carry into the bathroom, where she'd plop her in a tub of lukewarm water and wash her blotchy face until she'd cried herself out. Sometimes, she never cried herself out; she just cried herself to sleep in the tub.
She started askin' for you as soon as she could talk. Do', she'd scream or whimper, and reach for you with clutching, baby fingers. Do', Do', Do'. She knew early on that you were a protector, the guy to turn to when the world went to shit. She wouldn't stop howlin' until your ma put her in bed with you, and then it was like throwin' a switch. She'd stop cryin' just like that and pat your face or try to stick her fingers up your nose, and five minutes later, she'd be dead to the world, thumb in her mouth and diapered ass lodged against your stomach like she owned it. Once your parents figured you were the magic trick to stavin' off the screamin', it was your job to look after her, and from three to thirteen, that's what you did. Until there were too many hard points and subtly roundin' curves and too much burgeonin' knowledge to sleep comfortably and innocently.
You went to her room that night with the intention of seekin' her out, of wrappin' yourself in remembered comfort. You'd curl on top of her ugly, lavender sheets or on the hard floor and wait for the familiar sensation of an ass butted against your belly and balls or arms around your middle and an ear over your heart. But when you got to the threshold, you couldn't bring yourself to go inside. Not because she wasn't there, but because she was.
You could feel her from where you stood on the threshold, a heaviness in the center of your chest and a distant pressure on your eardrums. It was as though she had crept behind you to blow in your ear, but when you turned around, the hallway was empty. If you held your breath, you were sure you could hear the furtive rustle of her socks on the worn mat of the carpet or the shift of her body as she turned on her mattress. She was waitin' for you in the silence.
You hesitated. What if she was as mad at you as your folks were, especially your father, who was already buryin' you in his mind? What if she blamed you for her death, damned you for her stolen life? Why shouldn't she? It was your fault, and for most of the year before her death, she thought you hated her guts. The only reason she was there that night was because you were tryin' to prove her wrong. You loved her, loved her best and still and always, and you couldn't stand the thought of seein' disappointment etched on her face and knowin' it was forever.
But the chance to spend one last night with your little sister overwhelmed your shame, and you made up your mind to cross into her room. You had one foot up and your heart in your mouth when your father materialized outta thin air and blocked the doorway, an avengin' angel barrin' the gates of Eden. Instead of a flamin' sword, there were broad, slumped shoulders and a haggard, sleepless face.
What're you doin', boy? Tired, but there was no trace of sleep in his voice, no fuzziness of distance to indicate he was returnin' from the land of Nod to the here and now. It was the voice of a night watchman. The voice of the job, and you'd inherit it a few years down the road when you pulled off your white gloves and watched them flutter to the earth like shed feathers.
You gazed into your father's stony face. It was sharper in the dark, longer than it had any right to be, and you shuffled from foot to foot and hugged your pillow and blankets. You couldn't see his eyes in the dark, and you wondered if they were glazed with more than just grief and weariness. Like the scotch he kept in the cabinet above the stove.
You shrugged. I don't know, Pop, you answered slowly. I just wanted- Wanted to be where she was, to find the echo of her heart in the house. Her room was the place she'd spent the most time, the place where the world of her head and heart had the most power. It made sense that what was left of her would linger there. But you were sixteen and heartsick, and you didn't know how to say it. The words and the sentiments behind 'em were too adult for your child's mouth. So you let the sentence hang and prayed your old man would have a bout of parental osmosis like the ones that always got you and your sister in deep shit.
Well, Di won't have to worry 'bout that anymore, you thought suddenly, and the wave of grief that accompanied the thought coaxed a hiccoughing sob past your lips. Oh, shit, Di, I'm so fuckin' sorry.
But your father musta left his psychic powers in the bottom of the scotch bottle because his impassive expression never softened with understanding. He just stood in the doorway with his arms folded across his chest and watched you like you were a perp on the verge of spillin' his guts.
I just thought-, you began at last.
You don't think nothin', he barked. You done enough thinkin' today, and look where it got you. There ain't nothin' for you in here, he said. You ain't got no business in her room. Go on back to bed now.
He stepped into the hallway and closed her bedroom door behind him with an authoritative, final snick of engaging tumbler. He put paid to any thought of sneakin' in anyway by standin' in front of the door until you went back into your room.
Close your door, he ordered, and you knew better than to defy him.
You closed the door and locked it, and then you sat in the middle of your bed with your knees drawn to your chest and your ankles crossed and listened to him hover outside your door. Sometimes you could see the shadow of his feet beneath the door as they paced back and forth, drew near and backed off again. He was standin' guard, making dead sure you obeyed his law. He was there for nearly an hour before you felt him leave, and after he was gone, you laid down, turned to face the window, and waited for dawn to paint the sky.
You went into her room for the last time three days later, when your ma was changin' the sheets over and over again, fluffin' 'em and smoothin' 'em down again like she was tryin' to reform her daughter from the miniscule bits of her embedded in the linens and mattress. It was a wrenchin', fruitless task, made more so by the fact that Diana was everywhere you looked. In the ugly, lavender sheets your ma was smoothin' over and over again with her tremblin' hands. In the My Little Pony that was still perched on the corner of her dresser even though she'd outgrown it years ago, and in the Strawberry Shortcake doll at the foot of her bed that was supposed to smell like strawberries, but just smelled like a plastic fart. Especially in the Nancy Drew books that littered her room in teeterin' piles, on the night table beside her bed and peeked from beneath it. Your folks mighta hoped she'd get married and be a seamstress or weddin' planner in between havin' babies, but you'd always thought she'd follow in your old man's footsteps and yours, or maybe she woulda been a member of the Nerd Squad, that modern-day Clue Club that found clues in smears of dirt and blood.
Your ma didn't want you in there, either, and she shooed you out with her tears and her red, raw, grief-ravaged face. You never set foot in it again, and the next time you saw it, the mattress had been stripped and Diana's belongin's had been packed and delivered to Goodwill and the Salvation Army, her abbreviated life donated to the homeless and the down-and-outs.
The door to her room has remained closed ever since as far as you know, and you can't help but wonder if they've trapped her inside those four barren walls. You're tempted to find out, to slip into your parents' house while they're on their annual vacation to the Keys and break the seal on her room. It wouldn't be hard with your trainin'; hell, if push came to shove, you could hammer the hinges out and replace 'em when you were through with your pilgrimage. You could open the door, go inside and stand in the center of the room, and listen for the small, quiet voice of reunion.
You know how the room would feel because you've felt the same in hundreds of rooms devoted to memories of the dead. It doesn't matter that everything that identified the room as your sister's will be gone. Your memory will replace everything as it was, including her. You'll see her stretched across the bed like a contented cat, ankles crossed and raised behind her and fingers splayed over the pages of a book to keep it open. Maybe she'll be nibbling on her rosary while she reads, and when she looks up and sees you, she'll roll her eyes, but the corner of her mouth will twitch in secret happiness.
What d'you want, Donnie? she'll demand, but she'll roll onto her side in tacit invitation to join her.
Your sister's room is a shrine stripped of its idols and fetishes. This room will be a shrine, too, if your girl never comes back, only you won't strip it bare. You'll leave everything as it is, even if they find her floating in the muck and garbage of Long Island sound. Especially then. As painful as it would be to relive the memories it would inspire, it'd hurt a helluva lot more to be left with nothin' an empty room. If you leave it untouched, she might see fit to visit you now and then. You might look up from your DD-5s and see her sittin' at her whiteboard or awaken in the night to the sound of her peckin' at her keyboard in the throes of her latest stroke of genius. You'll never need to look for her like you do your sister 'cause you'll already know where she is.
The room was as he remembered it from the last time he had glanced into it. The desk was against the far wall, covered with papers and folders and geegaws he could not identify. Rebecca's laptop was in the center, closed, and a reading lap bowed over it like a penitent monk.
On the adjacent wall was her whiteboard, but it was not white today. It was covered in blue numbers, symbols, and lines, the secret language of his girl's mind. He had tried to understand that language once upon a time, in the beginning of their courtship when he had wanted to impress her, but it had been too advanced, too thick inside his head. It was a language of unspeakable vowels and too few consonants, and he had surrendered quickly and left the task of translation to her infinitely capable hands. He wished that he could speak it now, or at least read it. Maybe it would tell him where she had gone.
Or why she went, added Gavin as he slipped into the room. Not just her body, but the rest of her, all the best parts. She can be sittin' right beside you, fingers threaded loosely through yours, and somehow you know she's a million miles away in a place you can't follow. Her voice and eyes are distant, adrift. She gets that way sometimes when she's gotten wind of a big idea or is hip-deep in a big project, and it never used to bother you because it was part of her genius, and besides, you get that way yourself when you're on a big case or gearin' up for a big raid.
But lately, it's been different. She's somewhere else almost all the time. She drinks her tea on autopilot and gets ready for bed the same way, with eyes wide shut. Sometimes, you wonder if she sees you at all, and you're tempted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until the light comes on in her eyes and she acknowledges you as more than a fixture in the comfortable set of her life. You want to make her teeth rattle and her bones pop and grind in her unbalanced sockets until somethin' other than blankness fills her eyes. Even if that somethin' is anger.
It used'ta be easy to bring her back to herself and the present; a touch was all it took, or a gentle word. Her name. You could lift her from her chair and twirl her in your arms, and her smile'd light up the whole damn apartment. She'd fuckin' glow with happiness. Now the only time you glimpse that light is when you're hip to hip in bed, movin' together beneath the sheets in a sweaty tangle, and the glimpse lasts only as long as the last possessive, jerky surge of your hips. Then the light gutters and dies, and you're left gropin' in the dark for the girl you miss so fuckin' much, the beautiful, lively girl Lessing stole with his damn pussy bomb.
It all came back to Lessing and his bomb. There was life Before and life After. Before had been sure and steady and ever-treading the upward path. They'd had plans and a tentative roadmap of how to get there, but there hadn't been any hurry. They'd had time in the palms of their hands. The morning he'd left for a date with open guts, they'd shared a quick breakfast and broached the subject of starting a family. Nothing concrete, nothing serious. Just talk, a gentle dance around the subject that had made his heartbeat quicken in his chest.
I could have a family, he'd thought as he'd driven to the scene. Then he'd met Mac at the scene with the dead security guard, and everything had gone to hell.
Before had been obliterated in the explosion. He had tried to pick up the pieces, but they had cut his hands as they slipped through his fingers, and those he could hold on to refused to fit where they once had. Now there was only After, with its jagged edges and gaping holes. It was a limbo where nothing was quite as it should be, life in a funhouse mirror. He felt distorted and stretched inside his skin, and the edges of his world were warped. His job was too loud, and his wife was too quiet, and the idea of having a child was a joke. He and Rebecca were ghosts in this house, and ghosts had no right to make a life for anyone else.
He went to her desk and sorted through the papers scattered haphazardly over its surface. Post-It notes adorned her laptop, protruded from the sleek, black casing like lesions. OBGyn Appt. 1/03, read one. Another said simply, Bday for my prince. He peeled the note from the laptop and drew his thumb over the painful, determined scrawl of Rebecca's handwriting. They weren't even out of Christmas yet, and she was worried about his birthday; the faintest of signs that his girl was still alive beneath her scrim of bland indifference. He replaced the note and picked up a stack of pages from her printer bay. A cursory glance told him it was more of her secret language parsed into the common tongue, a proposal for a ten-thousand-dollar research grant. He put it down. Student papers, lecture notes, pages torn from her day planner, grocery lists, geometric patterns scribbled on pages of a yellow pad. And at the bottom of one page, nearly lost in the clutter of her brilliance, four simple words: I love you, babe. He wondered how long ago she had written them and if she had intended him to see them.
He went into the living room and sat on the couch, and it was only when he saw the small Christmas tree in the corner that he realized it was Christmas Day. The presents settled underneath the tree like obedient, well-dressed children, and he found himself cataloguing the ones he remembered. A new pair of biking gloves for her hands. New tennis shoes with Velcro fasteners. Those were a custom job; Velcro was for children, not college professors. A new watch for formal occasions, a delicate golden band with diamond dust around the bezel. He had wound and set it before he wrapped it so she would not have to, and he imagined it ticking inexorably inside its velvet box, marking the seconds and wondering why it had not been unearthed from its temporary tomb.
There were other boxes and packages, too, and these he did not recognize. They were for him, he supposed, gifts from his mother and Rebecca. Shirts and suits and ties, maybe a new pair of dress shoes. Nothing special. Nothing dangerous. Nothing that would be crushed by the ravenous demands of the job. She had learned that lesson already. He wondered which of the pretty boxes would lead him back to Before if he pulled the ribbon and wished upon a star.
He reached for the telephone beside the couch and hit speed dial. Three rings later, Scagnetti picked up.
"Yeah, Detective Scagnetti," he grunted, and Flack could see him scratching his johnson as he spoke.
"Scagnetti, it's Flack," he said.
"Oh. Hey, Flack. What can I do for ya? Shouldn't you be bonin' the missus? Salutin' St. Nick with your hard, jolly dick?" He chuckled at his own wit. "How's she doin' anyways?"
"Listen, Scagnetti, I need you to put a BOLO on my girl. She wasn't in bed when I woke up last night, and she's still not here. It's probably nothin', but it ain't like her to be gone this long and not call. I just wanna make sure she didn't go off for some last-minute shoppin' and get hit by a cab or somethin', you know?"
"You checked the local hospitals?" All business now, and he thought he heard the click of a ballpoint pen, sharp and earnest as the cocking of a Glock.
"Naw, but I'm gonna start soon as I hang up."
Scagnetti grunted. "I'll call, too, if ya want. Go faster an' alla that."
"Yeah. Thanks."
"No problem." A pause, and Flack could hear the gears grinding inside Sacagnetti's head as he struggled for something to say that would not be full of shit and empty platitudes. Finally, he said, "Anyways, I'll get that BOLO out. Half the PD'll be lookin' for her in five minutes. You call if she turns up?"
"Absolutely."
"Hang in there, kid," Scagnetti said, and hung up.
He hung up, scrubbed his face with one dry palm, and picked up the receiver again. The first hospital he called was Trinity, the hospital that had saved his life in return for three miserable weeks of it. There would be a bitter, poetic justice in it if she were there. They would be a matching set, Jack and his broken Jill, put together again by the same doctor. The idea made so much sense that he was stunned when the admissions nurse informed him that she was not there, so much so that he insisted that she check the list of recent admissions for Jane Does matching her description. But there were no blonde china dolls with broken wings and exposed hearts, and he hung up without saying thank you or goodbye.
Kings County, Coney Island Hospital, Jacobi, Queens, Bellevue. He dialed them all one by one, fingers growing more unsteady with every negative answer. He should be relieved; most people would be to know that their world was not lying shattered and bleeding on some trauma gurney while a surgeon sewed them back together with catgut and twelve years of training. But he knew better. In a hospital, at least someone was taking care of them. He knew all too well what could happen when no one was looking. He had cleaned it up too many times to count and delivered the sorry remains of the aftermath to the Nerd Squad.
His hands were shaking so badly by the time he dialed Woodhull Medical Center that he had to dial twice. The mechanical, disinterested voice of an automated system had just picked up and begun to recite a laundry list of departments and extensions when he heard the unmistakable scrape of a key in the lock of the front door.
"Shit." Muffled and irritated. Then the key slid home, and the door swung inward to reveal Rebecca, bundled against the cold and carrying a white, paper bag on her lap.
"Where the hell have you been?" he demanded. Too loud, too full of worry and adrenaline. The automated voice in his ear paused in its litany of grand high poobahs of medical miracle to tell him that that was not a recognized extension, please repeat the command. He slammed the receiver into its cradle hard enough to elicit a fearful bleep from the phone and stalked to the door, where Rebecca blinked at him in comical surprise.
She held up the paper bag. "Bagels," she announced uncertainly. "I thought you might want breakfast. I forgot that even the cradle of Scrooge celebrates Christmas." She pulled off her knit cap and shook snow from the ends of her hair.
His mouth worked. She was lovely with the dusting of snow in her hair and roses in her cheeks. "Bagels?" he repeated. "Do you have any fuckin' idea- I've got half the PD lookin' for you."
She froze in the act of peeling off her gloves. "PD? Love, it was just-,"
"Since three in the fuckin' mornin?" he shouted. "Don't tell me it was just a bagel run, Rebecca, 'cause I'm not fuckin' stupid, just a hunk of fuckin' dick for you to play with."
"I never said you were," she shot back, and slapped her gloves onto her lap. "Ever."
"Yeah? Well, right now, you're actin' like it."
She let out a deep breath. "Because I brought you bagels?"
He fought the urge to swat the crumpled sack from her lap. "Fuck the bagels," he snapped. "This is about you bein' gone from my bed since three in the goddamn mornin'."
"Your bed?" she countered softly, and slipped her coat off her shoulders.
"Our bed," he corrected gently, and reached to help her with her coat. It was unthinking impulse. "Our bed. But I ain't gonna stand here and play Pick That Adjective with you."
"So don't." She kissed his palm and nudged past him into the living room. "I got plain, sesame seed, cinnamon raisin, blueberry, and pumpernickel."
"I don't give a damn about the bagels. Where the hell were you?"
She turned to face him. "Obviously not where you think I was," she answered mildly.
"Oh, yeah? And where might that be?"
She approached him until her footplates scraped his bare shins, set her brakes, and opened her legrests. "With another man." She reached out and flattened her palm against his bare belly, splayed fingers spidering over his scar. She leaned forward and planted butterfly kisses in the cup of his navel.
"That's not going to work," he said, but he made no move to retreat from the contact. There had been too many nights of sleeping in the same bed miles apart. His hand dropped to cup the back of her head.
She laughed, and it vibrated over his skin in a warm rush of air. "I'm not, you know," she murmured. "With another man. There's never going to be anybody else." Muffled and vague with contentment. "Frankly, I'm surprised you noticed I was gone."
Irritation prickled his skin like nettles. "I ain't a dumbass." Then, more softly, "I always notice when you're gone."
She looked up at him, and her expression twisted his heart. It was mournful and adoring and tinged with inexplicable sorrow and longing. "Oh, love," she murmured, and wobbled to her feet with a startlingly serpentine undulation of her spine. She balanced herself with her hands on his shoulders and rested her head on his chest.
He wrapped his arms around her to support her. "Where you been goin', huh, doll?" he asked. "What's got you sneakin' out in the middle of the night if not some other guy?"
"A ghost. Or a spot of underdone potato if you prefer." She scratched his back in slow, lazy circles."
"What?" Befuddled and a trifle impatient.
"Nothing. It was a riff on A Christmas Carol." She mouthed the bony plate of his sternum, and her breath tickled the coarse hair there.
"Very nice; I know you're a genius, Rebecca. I don't need proof of your hundred-grand education. I need an answer as to where the fuck you've been for the last four hours."
"But it does answer your question-sort of," she countered defensively. "Just not directly."
"You know what gets me hard? A straight answer."
"Oh, I know all kinds of things that get you hard," she murmured wickedly. "But point taken." She planted a kiss on his sternum and made to sit.
He eased her into her chair, and she turned and rolled into the kitchen with the bag of bagels on her lap.
"I went to talk to someone," she said at length, and plugged in the coffeepot. "An old teacher. I needed advice."
"This teacher got a name?" He followed her into the kitchen and sat down at the table.
"He does. You wouldn't know it." She opened the bag of bagels, took out a blueberry one, and set it on a paper towel.
"Enlighten me," he pressed.
She sighed and took a butter knife from the silverware drawer. "Professor Snape. You won't find him in any of your high-tech databases, so I wouldn't waste the time." She cut the bagel in half with laborious, choppy strokes. "He was my chemistry teacher while I studied abroad."
"You mean durin' those three years you don't talk about?"
"Yes. Bagel?"
"Sesame seed."
She rummaged in the bag, retrieved a sesame-seed bagel, and began to saw at it.
"So why this Snape guy? He a mentor of yours?"
She laughed, sultry and bitter, pebbles rolling down a quarry hill, and he swallowed a flicker of unease. She was suddenly hard underneath the skin, marble under crepe, and he thought that if she looked at him now, her gaze would be ancient and reptilian, a crocodile surveying a struggling wildebeest from the baking sanctuary of its mud flat.
"Yes," she said. "Oh, yes."
All teeth and tongue now, muttered Gavin inside his head. Sure as shit. Bloodless and hard as iron and ready to tear the throat out of anything that moves. You didn't even know she had an expression like that until you woke up in the hospital and watched her strap it on with the nurses and Dr. Singh. Then she wore it all the time, a battle mask that never left her face 'cept when she looked at you. She caught the good doctor flat-footed more than once, and you, too. But you were too stoned to do anything but be grateful she was on your side. She strapped it on with the trainee nurse who hurt you while changin' your dressin's, and that girl left the room in tears and never came back. It's the face she wears when the gloves come off and the rules of civilized war don't apply. You don't like it much, and seeing it makes your balls retreat into your belly and your mouth go sour.
She looked at Lessing that way, too, on the day he was remanded to his suite at the rubber-room Hilton. You sat beside her in the gallery and watched her track Lessing, a mongoose watching the hypnotic sway of a cobra. The only movement came from her eyes as they tracked his movement in the courtroom. Her only reaction when he rose and read his prepared statement of gratitude into the official record was a twitch of her upper lip that bared her teeth. It was a stark, gut-level act that raised the hackles on the nape of your neck, and for one crazy moment as the bailiffs were leadin' him away, you thought she was gonna drop from her chair and run him down on all fours. But she didn't. She just let you lead her outta the courtroom, and she burst into tears on the courthouse ramp. Her tear-stained face was on page A-3 of the Times the next mornin' with a caption 'bout victims reactin' to the sentence. You threw out every copy you found because her anguish cramped your gut.
'It's not fair.' That's what she said over and over again on the bench outside the courthouse while tears ran down her face. You thought she was talkin' 'bout the sentence, the lifetime of state-paid care in exchange for six lives and your gut, but later you started to wonder. 'Specially on the days the rehab made your guts cramp and weep and the summer nights when the thunder rumbled and lightnin' cracked the sky and she lay on her side the bed with eyes wide open and didn't sleep. You turned that mornin' over in your head and asked yourself if she hadn't been talkin' 'bout somethin' else entirely. Somethin' like the chance to tear across that courtroom and fasten her teeth onto Lessing's throat. On nights like that, you'd pillow your head on your arm and watch the bony curve of her back for signs that it was changin', stretchin' and crackin' and becoming the framework for somethin' without a whole lotta give a damn in its eyes.
He watched Rebecca and waited for her to catch his eye. Part of him prayed that she wouldn't because he didn't want to see that terrible, shuttered blankness. But she did, and when their eyes met, his heart slowed because it was just her, tired and a little lost, but his girl nonetheless.
"I thought to follow in his footsteps for a time," she went on as she set the sliced bagels on the paper towel and rolled towards the refrigerator. "I idolized him."
"Chemistry teacher? Can't say I see it, doll."
She opened the refrigerator and searched the door for butter, strawberry jam, and honey. "Neither could he. As he put it, I was 'a rolling menace to civilized society, and should I attempt the fine art of chemistry, the resultant disaster would make the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem the aftereffects of bad curry.' If I wanted to blow myself up in the pursuit of the ridiculous and unattainable, I was welcome to do so, but not under his auspices, and not to the detriment of his profession. Cream cheese?"
He nodded. "Sounds like a charmer, this guy."
A snort from within the refrigerator, and then Rebecca backed away and closed the door. "The Professor was one of the most vicious, petty, gleefully savage pricks ever to walk the earth," she announced. It did not sound like condemnation.
"But," he prodded, mystified.
"But he was never a liar," she finished simply. "He was right; had I tried to pursue a career in chemistry, I would have hurt myself or someone else very badly. Probably look like Frankenstein by now."
She brought the bagels and assorted condiments to the table and then went back for his coffee. She set it in front of him and rolled into the space set aside for her.
"None for you?" he asked.
She shook her head and reached for the cream cheese. "You know tea is my drug of choice."
"Well, have a sip of this, and I'll make you some." He held his coffee cup to her lips and steadied it while she took a dainty sip.
He rose from the table and padded to the cupboard where she kept her tea. He brewed it in silence and carried to the table. She picked it up in both hands and took a careful sip.
"You're getting better," she mused. She set the cup on the table and pressed a lingering kiss to his temple.
Somethin's different about her, he thought as he turned into the kiss. For the first time in forever, she's not wired and thrummin' with nervous energy, ready to snap or shatter at the slightest provocation. She's my girl, like she used to be, when I could walk into the room where she was and just let it all go. The dirt, the job, the dead bodies and the victims still breathin'. I could shut the door and kiss her, and alla that faded into the background until I was ready to pick it up again.
He drew his lips down the slope of her nose and nuzzled her upper lip. He was tempted to kiss her, forget this conversation and carry her to bed, but he sat back and reached for his coffee instead. The easy way out was no longer an option. Not if he wanted her to stay this way.
"So you went to see this guy at three in the mornin'," he said.
She traced her finger around the rim of her mug. "Not the best timing," she agreed. "Not that he had much choice. Besides, I couldn't do this anymore. Not one more day." She sipped her tea and plucked a dried blueberry from her bagel.
"Do what anymore?" His throat was dry and painful.
"This." She gestured at the kitchen and living room. "I couldn't go another day pretending everything was getting better. It's still fucked up, still blown to hell, and nothing I was doing was making a difference."
He stared at her in disbelief. "But things are getting better, doll," he insisted. "I'm not hurtin' anymore, and I'm back on the job. I mean, I know I wasn't the best husband for a while there, but-,"
She smiled and covered his hand with hers. "You are doing fine, babe. You did the best you could under the circumstances, and I'm the luckiest woman in the world. It's me that's not getting any better. You're at the top of the hill, and I'm still trying to get out of the starting gate."
He drew the ball of his thumb over her knuckles and waited. She would tell him, or she wouldn't.
She shrugged. "Maybe it's because you had a goal. Getting back to the job."
"And you," he added quietly. "Always you."
She took a ragged breath, and he thought he saw the shimmer of unshed tears in her eyes, but her voice was steady when she spoke. "All I had, all I could do was sit and hold your hand and pray that you'd come through. I don't think I've ever felt so useless in my life. The doctors and nurses and Mac were all taking care of you-,"
"Mac didn't take care of shit, Rebecca," he said firmly. "He got me to the hospital, but the rest was all you. Did me wonders to wake up and see you sittin' there. You were beautiful."
"And you were stoned," she said fondly. Then she grew serious again. "What happened to you and the rehab after were your road, but the eight days between were mine, and I…lost it. I'd always understood I could lose you to the badge, but understanding and knowing are worlds apart, and I just…couldn't handle it. I just got so fucking pissed."
"At me."
She looked at him as though he'd proclaimed himself Ghandi. "You were the only person in the universe I wasn't pissed at. I was pissed at Lessing for the bomb, at your job for putting you in that building that morning, at the asshole with the Ipod. At your friends for being fine when you weren't. At myself for not being able to wave a magic wand and make it all go away. Hell, I was mad at the nurses for laughing when the world had so obviously come unglued."
"And my mother?"
"What about her?" Wary surprise.
"I know what she asked of you. I know about the papers."
Her eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed. "Hawkes," she said shrewdly.
"No, my father."
She uttered a short, ugly bark of laughter. "I'll be damned." She took an indelicate gulp of tea. "Narced by the elder."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Tell you what? That your mother wanted to harvest your semen and sell her grandchildren to the most acceptable applicant? God. You were in critical condition in the ICU with your guts held together by surgical stitching. I wasn't about to dump that in your lap, wasn't about to make you choose."
She thought she'd lose. She thought that if push came to shove, you'd choose blood over weddin' lace. That's why she kept her mouth shut.
The epiphany made his chest hurt. "You didn't tell me 'cause you thought you'd lose, didn't you?" It was a whisper.
She didn't look at him, and that was answer enough. He seized the armrest of her chair and jerked it until they were face to face, nose to nose and footplate to shin. He cupped her face in his hands. "You will never lose, do you understand?" Low, a whisper in the dark. "Rebecca Olivia Stanhope Flack, look at me. Do. You. Understand?"
"I-,"
"My mother had no right to do that to you. She was a bitch, and she's never gonna behave that way again. Not to you." He traced her cheekbones, fragile as china beneath his hands. Her eyes were wide and bewildered. She wanted to believe him, but she didn't quite dare; her vicious instinct for self-preservation would not allow it.
"But she's your mother." Plaintive.
"And I love her. But you're my wife, my girl, and when I married you, I gave you everythin'. It wasn't just a fuck-a piece of paper and a name change, doll. You won it all. The only babies I'm ever gonna make in this lifetime are gonna come from you, and if she doesn't like that, then that's too damn bad."
She curled her cool hands around his wrists and sat with her forehead pressed lightly to his. He could hear her swallowing against a hot, tight knot of emotions in her throat, and he dropped a comforting kiss on the crown of her head. When her labored breathing had eased, he lifted her chin so that their eyes met.
"Drink the rest of your tea before it gets cold," he said, and sat back. He handed her the half-full mug. "So, you see this Snape guy at three o'clock in the mornin' 'cause you needed advice. What'd you ask him?"
"I thought that when Lessing was sentenced, it would go away." She lifted her mug to her lips, and her hand trembled.
"What would?"
"The anger, the nightmares, the feeling of wanting to wet my pants and curl into a little ball every time you holstered up and went on shift. But it didn't. The anger only got worse. Hell, at the sentencing hearing, I wanted to rip his throat out and leave it bleeding on the courthouse floor. Sometimes, I feel like I'm choking on it. I'm afraid to touch you because I don't want to get it on you."
He thought of the sentencing hearing and that feral, furious curl of lip, and of last night, when she had burst into tears on her way down to glory. It had scared the shit out of him, the sudden reversal of fortune, and knowing the reason behind it made him no less uneasy.
And guilty, of course. The guilt was worst of all. He had tried his damndest not to hurt her with the sharp edges of his shield, not to crush her with the weight of his oath. He had separated her from it as best he could by leaving the worst of the job at the precinct doors and bringing home only the rare funny story of mistaken identity or bumbling crook. He had made sure to shower three times in the precinct shower with Irish Spring soap before he went home to her, to leave the grit of the streets and the filth of murderers in the drain trap of the stationhouse shower where they belonged. He had gone through bars of soap faster than the water poured from the showerhead, and in the end, it hadn't been enough. She'd still been blighted by the gleam of his badge. The proof was right in front of him.
He searched his memories in an attempt to pinpoint the moment of contamination. Maybe it had happened while he was sleeping, transferred by the brush of her hand over his bare back, or maybe it had been passed in a good-morning kiss before Crest and Listerine could sterilized his sleep-gummy mouth. Maybe it had happened while she was sucking him off with feverish abandon in the middle of the living room; maybe it was too deep in him to come out. Or maybe it had happened while she was cleaning his guts out of the crevices of his badge.
Or maybe it happened on the day Lessing laid your guts wide open and delivered her to a hospital waitin' room, his father grunted, and he saw him in his mind's eye, pouring Beam into a coffee cup and pushing the contents across the table. Maybe for all their scrubbin' and sterilizin', they missed a speck of dust from the buildin' and stirred it into the air like a blown kiss. Maybe it drifted on the stale currents of the buildin' and landed on her arm while she slumped in her chair and prayed to ten gods and thirteen demons that you wouldn't leave the hospital toes-up, or maybe you passed it to her on that first kiss after you returned to the land of the livin'. However she came by it, it's all your fault, and the damage has been done. Consider it a lawman's legacy.
"I couldn't go the rest of my life being afraid to love you, so I went to him because he doesn't lie."
"What did you ask him?"
"How to live with it. The hate. The fear like sugared pennies in my mouth."
"What did he say?"
"To live with the truth or die."
"That's it? It's that simple?"
She nodded. "That simple. He doesn't lie."
"So, what're you gonna do?" He swallowed a mouthful of lukewarm coffee to moisten his throat.
She smiled at him, an impish, radiant smile that warmed her eyes and made her lovely and impossibly young. "I'm going to live, babe. It's the only choice there is."
He blinked at her, suddenly giddy. "Just like that?"
Her smile widened. "Just like that." She picked up her tea and drained it.
He wanted to believe her, but there had been too many false starts, too many returns to midnight. It wasn't until three days later, when she laughed as he entwined their bodies after a shower, that he accepted the gift from an anonymous donor. It was bright, brilliant, living laughter, not a remembered echo of happier days. She was still broken, still fragile, and there was still work to be done, but this time when he reached for a piece of her that had fallen away, it was to create something new, something beautiful untarnished by yesterday's sorrow. As he arched his back and dipped his head to kiss her laughing lips, he spared a thought for Professor Snape, the chemistry professor who could not tell a lie. He thanked him for a miracle smooth and warm beneath his hands, and promised himself that if they ever met, he'd buy the man a pint in gratitude for each of his tomorrows.
Author:
laguera25Fandom(s): HP/CSI:NY
Rating: FRAO
Pairing: Don Flack/OFC
Spoilers: S1, S2, and S3; HP to Book 6
Disclaimer: All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.
A/N: One more to go. God knows if it will be posted here because Of LJ's lunacy; unless there is a clear explanation of LJ's new content policies and suspension/deletion procedures within 24 hours, I will be picking up stakes and moving to another blogging site. Stay tuned. Frankly, given LJ's egregious conduct throughout this sordid affair, I am not hopeful.
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII Part IX Part X Part XI Part XII Part XIII Part XIV Part XV
He checked the apartment twice to be sure, moved from room to room with methodical precision on legs that moved only because the motion was ingrained by muscle memory and years of training. His empty fingers curled around the grip of a pistol he did not hold, and his tongue was hot and small on the floor of his mouth, a dry pebble that threatened to choke him each time he swallowed. He ended where he had begun, standing in his socked feet in the doorway of the room that served as Rebecca's den of numbers.
The room was gloomy in the pre-dawn light, and it occurred to him that this was how a room looked when its dearest and most frequent occupant was no more, reduced to memories and two-dimensional photographs already beginning to fade. He had seen it a thousand times in the living rooms and kitchens of widows and sudden orphans. Absence took on a weight of its own in the houses of the unexpected dead.
It was the way Diana's room looked after she was gone, Gavin observed inside his head, gruff and tender all at once. The night she died, you couldn't sleep; every time you closed your eyes, you found yourself inside the Whisper House, tuggin' on her frozen arm in a bid to snatch her from the snappin' jaws of that damn pile. But she wouldn't come. She was rooted to that filthy floor and starin' into the dark with eyes like covered mirrors. She was already gone, but you didn't know that, didn't want to know, so you pulled until the dream carried you onto the lawn and left you on your hands and knees in the wet, cold grass, snivelin' and pukin' and starin' into the face of your father.
Sleeplessness was better than lookin' into them cold, dead eyes, so you opened your eyes wide and stared at the ceilin'. That was okay until you started seein' your sister's face in the darkness above your bed. It twisted itself into shape from the sparse light from the buildin's across the street and the hard, spidery fingers of the trees in the backyard. It came and went, like she was playin' one last game of peek-a-boo before childhood ended and forever began. Seein' her made your chest ache and filled you with a longin' that burned like sickness in your gut. You wanted to reach up and touch her face when you saw it, fill the cup'a your palm with its dark cheek, but you were afraid, 'cause you knew it would disappear the second you tried, fragile as the hope that made it, and you didn't wanna be disappointed.
You saw her in other places in your room, too. You thought she was hunkered at the foot of your bed, rocked back on her haunches with her arms dangling loosely between her thighs. You thought she was watchin' you, and that any minute, she was gonna open her mouth and eat the night. You knew that when she did, her teeth would be long, narrow needles and gleam silver in the faint light. You held your breath and waited for a cool, fleshless hand to dart out and seize your ankle, the better to drag you under. If she caught you, you would wake up inside her coffin, facedown in the liner with her death in your nostril.
You left your ankle exposed just in case. You wanted to go with her, even if she was damned to ride the rivers of Hell. Home was wherever she was, and Hell was more than you deserved anyway.
She never grabbed your ankle because she wasn't there. The shadow at the foot of your bed was your dirty clothes and wishful thinkin'. So you swung your feet over the side of the bed, a lure to coax her from under the bed in case she'd decided to play hide and seek, too. You whispered her name through a wad of phlegm in your throat and willed her to come out, come out wherever she was.
Ollie, Ollie oxen free, you murmured to the floor, and watched your feet with feverish, tear-stained hope. Ollie, Ollie oxen free, Di.
But she never came out of hiding, and even in grief, your patience wasn't inexhaustible, so you gathered your pillow and a blanket and padded across the hall to her room and stood on the threshold just like now, in your socked feet with tears and weariness in your eyes. Your heartbeat vibrated against your ribcage and made your vision blur and waver at the edges. You wanted to sit down and rock back and forth, but you knew that if you did, you'd never regain your feet. You'd just sit there until morning, when either your ma or pop shambled upstairs and found you on the floor like a pillar of salt. So you stayed upright with your beddin' clutched to your chest like a goddamned teddy bear.
You'd planned on goin' right in and settlin' into her bed, or, if that knife cut too deep or too close, beddin' down on the floor beside it like you did when you were kids. You used'ta drape a sheet over chairs and call it a tent. You went campin'. Sometimes, you slept on the floor because it was warmer on those deep winter night when the furnace went to shit and the cold cut like piano wire across exposed skin. It was warmer heartbeat to heartbeat under the flannel blankets your Pop brought up from the basement. It was safer, sweeter, and you did it as often as you could until circumstance and basic biology said you couldn't.
Sometimes, you'd slept on the floor together to keep her night terrors under control. They started as soon as she was old enough to dream, and she could raise hackles with her screams. Your folks tried everythin'-your old man, who thought his fatherin' responsibilities ended at the crotch of his undershorts, walked her across the floor of the nursery for hours on end, makin' up nonsense nursery rhymes and recitin' baseballs stats while he bounced her in his arms-but she just kept screamin', chubby toddler fingers clawin' at the collar of his undershirt. She'd scream until she puked sometimes, and then your ma would lift her from your father's arms and carry into the bathroom, where she'd plop her in a tub of lukewarm water and wash her blotchy face until she'd cried herself out. Sometimes, she never cried herself out; she just cried herself to sleep in the tub.
She started askin' for you as soon as she could talk. Do', she'd scream or whimper, and reach for you with clutching, baby fingers. Do', Do', Do'. She knew early on that you were a protector, the guy to turn to when the world went to shit. She wouldn't stop howlin' until your ma put her in bed with you, and then it was like throwin' a switch. She'd stop cryin' just like that and pat your face or try to stick her fingers up your nose, and five minutes later, she'd be dead to the world, thumb in her mouth and diapered ass lodged against your stomach like she owned it. Once your parents figured you were the magic trick to stavin' off the screamin', it was your job to look after her, and from three to thirteen, that's what you did. Until there were too many hard points and subtly roundin' curves and too much burgeonin' knowledge to sleep comfortably and innocently.
You went to her room that night with the intention of seekin' her out, of wrappin' yourself in remembered comfort. You'd curl on top of her ugly, lavender sheets or on the hard floor and wait for the familiar sensation of an ass butted against your belly and balls or arms around your middle and an ear over your heart. But when you got to the threshold, you couldn't bring yourself to go inside. Not because she wasn't there, but because she was.
You could feel her from where you stood on the threshold, a heaviness in the center of your chest and a distant pressure on your eardrums. It was as though she had crept behind you to blow in your ear, but when you turned around, the hallway was empty. If you held your breath, you were sure you could hear the furtive rustle of her socks on the worn mat of the carpet or the shift of her body as she turned on her mattress. She was waitin' for you in the silence.
You hesitated. What if she was as mad at you as your folks were, especially your father, who was already buryin' you in his mind? What if she blamed you for her death, damned you for her stolen life? Why shouldn't she? It was your fault, and for most of the year before her death, she thought you hated her guts. The only reason she was there that night was because you were tryin' to prove her wrong. You loved her, loved her best and still and always, and you couldn't stand the thought of seein' disappointment etched on her face and knowin' it was forever.
But the chance to spend one last night with your little sister overwhelmed your shame, and you made up your mind to cross into her room. You had one foot up and your heart in your mouth when your father materialized outta thin air and blocked the doorway, an avengin' angel barrin' the gates of Eden. Instead of a flamin' sword, there were broad, slumped shoulders and a haggard, sleepless face.
What're you doin', boy? Tired, but there was no trace of sleep in his voice, no fuzziness of distance to indicate he was returnin' from the land of Nod to the here and now. It was the voice of a night watchman. The voice of the job, and you'd inherit it a few years down the road when you pulled off your white gloves and watched them flutter to the earth like shed feathers.
You gazed into your father's stony face. It was sharper in the dark, longer than it had any right to be, and you shuffled from foot to foot and hugged your pillow and blankets. You couldn't see his eyes in the dark, and you wondered if they were glazed with more than just grief and weariness. Like the scotch he kept in the cabinet above the stove.
You shrugged. I don't know, Pop, you answered slowly. I just wanted- Wanted to be where she was, to find the echo of her heart in the house. Her room was the place she'd spent the most time, the place where the world of her head and heart had the most power. It made sense that what was left of her would linger there. But you were sixteen and heartsick, and you didn't know how to say it. The words and the sentiments behind 'em were too adult for your child's mouth. So you let the sentence hang and prayed your old man would have a bout of parental osmosis like the ones that always got you and your sister in deep shit.
Well, Di won't have to worry 'bout that anymore, you thought suddenly, and the wave of grief that accompanied the thought coaxed a hiccoughing sob past your lips. Oh, shit, Di, I'm so fuckin' sorry.
But your father musta left his psychic powers in the bottom of the scotch bottle because his impassive expression never softened with understanding. He just stood in the doorway with his arms folded across his chest and watched you like you were a perp on the verge of spillin' his guts.
I just thought-, you began at last.
You don't think nothin', he barked. You done enough thinkin' today, and look where it got you. There ain't nothin' for you in here, he said. You ain't got no business in her room. Go on back to bed now.
He stepped into the hallway and closed her bedroom door behind him with an authoritative, final snick of engaging tumbler. He put paid to any thought of sneakin' in anyway by standin' in front of the door until you went back into your room.
Close your door, he ordered, and you knew better than to defy him.
You closed the door and locked it, and then you sat in the middle of your bed with your knees drawn to your chest and your ankles crossed and listened to him hover outside your door. Sometimes you could see the shadow of his feet beneath the door as they paced back and forth, drew near and backed off again. He was standin' guard, making dead sure you obeyed his law. He was there for nearly an hour before you felt him leave, and after he was gone, you laid down, turned to face the window, and waited for dawn to paint the sky.
You went into her room for the last time three days later, when your ma was changin' the sheets over and over again, fluffin' 'em and smoothin' 'em down again like she was tryin' to reform her daughter from the miniscule bits of her embedded in the linens and mattress. It was a wrenchin', fruitless task, made more so by the fact that Diana was everywhere you looked. In the ugly, lavender sheets your ma was smoothin' over and over again with her tremblin' hands. In the My Little Pony that was still perched on the corner of her dresser even though she'd outgrown it years ago, and in the Strawberry Shortcake doll at the foot of her bed that was supposed to smell like strawberries, but just smelled like a plastic fart. Especially in the Nancy Drew books that littered her room in teeterin' piles, on the night table beside her bed and peeked from beneath it. Your folks mighta hoped she'd get married and be a seamstress or weddin' planner in between havin' babies, but you'd always thought she'd follow in your old man's footsteps and yours, or maybe she woulda been a member of the Nerd Squad, that modern-day Clue Club that found clues in smears of dirt and blood.
Your ma didn't want you in there, either, and she shooed you out with her tears and her red, raw, grief-ravaged face. You never set foot in it again, and the next time you saw it, the mattress had been stripped and Diana's belongin's had been packed and delivered to Goodwill and the Salvation Army, her abbreviated life donated to the homeless and the down-and-outs.
The door to her room has remained closed ever since as far as you know, and you can't help but wonder if they've trapped her inside those four barren walls. You're tempted to find out, to slip into your parents' house while they're on their annual vacation to the Keys and break the seal on her room. It wouldn't be hard with your trainin'; hell, if push came to shove, you could hammer the hinges out and replace 'em when you were through with your pilgrimage. You could open the door, go inside and stand in the center of the room, and listen for the small, quiet voice of reunion.
You know how the room would feel because you've felt the same in hundreds of rooms devoted to memories of the dead. It doesn't matter that everything that identified the room as your sister's will be gone. Your memory will replace everything as it was, including her. You'll see her stretched across the bed like a contented cat, ankles crossed and raised behind her and fingers splayed over the pages of a book to keep it open. Maybe she'll be nibbling on her rosary while she reads, and when she looks up and sees you, she'll roll her eyes, but the corner of her mouth will twitch in secret happiness.
What d'you want, Donnie? she'll demand, but she'll roll onto her side in tacit invitation to join her.
Your sister's room is a shrine stripped of its idols and fetishes. This room will be a shrine, too, if your girl never comes back, only you won't strip it bare. You'll leave everything as it is, even if they find her floating in the muck and garbage of Long Island sound. Especially then. As painful as it would be to relive the memories it would inspire, it'd hurt a helluva lot more to be left with nothin' an empty room. If you leave it untouched, she might see fit to visit you now and then. You might look up from your DD-5s and see her sittin' at her whiteboard or awaken in the night to the sound of her peckin' at her keyboard in the throes of her latest stroke of genius. You'll never need to look for her like you do your sister 'cause you'll already know where she is.
The room was as he remembered it from the last time he had glanced into it. The desk was against the far wall, covered with papers and folders and geegaws he could not identify. Rebecca's laptop was in the center, closed, and a reading lap bowed over it like a penitent monk.
On the adjacent wall was her whiteboard, but it was not white today. It was covered in blue numbers, symbols, and lines, the secret language of his girl's mind. He had tried to understand that language once upon a time, in the beginning of their courtship when he had wanted to impress her, but it had been too advanced, too thick inside his head. It was a language of unspeakable vowels and too few consonants, and he had surrendered quickly and left the task of translation to her infinitely capable hands. He wished that he could speak it now, or at least read it. Maybe it would tell him where she had gone.
Or why she went, added Gavin as he slipped into the room. Not just her body, but the rest of her, all the best parts. She can be sittin' right beside you, fingers threaded loosely through yours, and somehow you know she's a million miles away in a place you can't follow. Her voice and eyes are distant, adrift. She gets that way sometimes when she's gotten wind of a big idea or is hip-deep in a big project, and it never used to bother you because it was part of her genius, and besides, you get that way yourself when you're on a big case or gearin' up for a big raid.
But lately, it's been different. She's somewhere else almost all the time. She drinks her tea on autopilot and gets ready for bed the same way, with eyes wide shut. Sometimes, you wonder if she sees you at all, and you're tempted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until the light comes on in her eyes and she acknowledges you as more than a fixture in the comfortable set of her life. You want to make her teeth rattle and her bones pop and grind in her unbalanced sockets until somethin' other than blankness fills her eyes. Even if that somethin' is anger.
It used'ta be easy to bring her back to herself and the present; a touch was all it took, or a gentle word. Her name. You could lift her from her chair and twirl her in your arms, and her smile'd light up the whole damn apartment. She'd fuckin' glow with happiness. Now the only time you glimpse that light is when you're hip to hip in bed, movin' together beneath the sheets in a sweaty tangle, and the glimpse lasts only as long as the last possessive, jerky surge of your hips. Then the light gutters and dies, and you're left gropin' in the dark for the girl you miss so fuckin' much, the beautiful, lively girl Lessing stole with his damn pussy bomb.
It all came back to Lessing and his bomb. There was life Before and life After. Before had been sure and steady and ever-treading the upward path. They'd had plans and a tentative roadmap of how to get there, but there hadn't been any hurry. They'd had time in the palms of their hands. The morning he'd left for a date with open guts, they'd shared a quick breakfast and broached the subject of starting a family. Nothing concrete, nothing serious. Just talk, a gentle dance around the subject that had made his heartbeat quicken in his chest.
I could have a family, he'd thought as he'd driven to the scene. Then he'd met Mac at the scene with the dead security guard, and everything had gone to hell.
Before had been obliterated in the explosion. He had tried to pick up the pieces, but they had cut his hands as they slipped through his fingers, and those he could hold on to refused to fit where they once had. Now there was only After, with its jagged edges and gaping holes. It was a limbo where nothing was quite as it should be, life in a funhouse mirror. He felt distorted and stretched inside his skin, and the edges of his world were warped. His job was too loud, and his wife was too quiet, and the idea of having a child was a joke. He and Rebecca were ghosts in this house, and ghosts had no right to make a life for anyone else.
He went to her desk and sorted through the papers scattered haphazardly over its surface. Post-It notes adorned her laptop, protruded from the sleek, black casing like lesions. OBGyn Appt. 1/03, read one. Another said simply, Bday for my prince. He peeled the note from the laptop and drew his thumb over the painful, determined scrawl of Rebecca's handwriting. They weren't even out of Christmas yet, and she was worried about his birthday; the faintest of signs that his girl was still alive beneath her scrim of bland indifference. He replaced the note and picked up a stack of pages from her printer bay. A cursory glance told him it was more of her secret language parsed into the common tongue, a proposal for a ten-thousand-dollar research grant. He put it down. Student papers, lecture notes, pages torn from her day planner, grocery lists, geometric patterns scribbled on pages of a yellow pad. And at the bottom of one page, nearly lost in the clutter of her brilliance, four simple words: I love you, babe. He wondered how long ago she had written them and if she had intended him to see them.
He went into the living room and sat on the couch, and it was only when he saw the small Christmas tree in the corner that he realized it was Christmas Day. The presents settled underneath the tree like obedient, well-dressed children, and he found himself cataloguing the ones he remembered. A new pair of biking gloves for her hands. New tennis shoes with Velcro fasteners. Those were a custom job; Velcro was for children, not college professors. A new watch for formal occasions, a delicate golden band with diamond dust around the bezel. He had wound and set it before he wrapped it so she would not have to, and he imagined it ticking inexorably inside its velvet box, marking the seconds and wondering why it had not been unearthed from its temporary tomb.
There were other boxes and packages, too, and these he did not recognize. They were for him, he supposed, gifts from his mother and Rebecca. Shirts and suits and ties, maybe a new pair of dress shoes. Nothing special. Nothing dangerous. Nothing that would be crushed by the ravenous demands of the job. She had learned that lesson already. He wondered which of the pretty boxes would lead him back to Before if he pulled the ribbon and wished upon a star.
He reached for the telephone beside the couch and hit speed dial. Three rings later, Scagnetti picked up.
"Yeah, Detective Scagnetti," he grunted, and Flack could see him scratching his johnson as he spoke.
"Scagnetti, it's Flack," he said.
"Oh. Hey, Flack. What can I do for ya? Shouldn't you be bonin' the missus? Salutin' St. Nick with your hard, jolly dick?" He chuckled at his own wit. "How's she doin' anyways?"
"Listen, Scagnetti, I need you to put a BOLO on my girl. She wasn't in bed when I woke up last night, and she's still not here. It's probably nothin', but it ain't like her to be gone this long and not call. I just wanna make sure she didn't go off for some last-minute shoppin' and get hit by a cab or somethin', you know?"
"You checked the local hospitals?" All business now, and he thought he heard the click of a ballpoint pen, sharp and earnest as the cocking of a Glock.
"Naw, but I'm gonna start soon as I hang up."
Scagnetti grunted. "I'll call, too, if ya want. Go faster an' alla that."
"Yeah. Thanks."
"No problem." A pause, and Flack could hear the gears grinding inside Sacagnetti's head as he struggled for something to say that would not be full of shit and empty platitudes. Finally, he said, "Anyways, I'll get that BOLO out. Half the PD'll be lookin' for her in five minutes. You call if she turns up?"
"Absolutely."
"Hang in there, kid," Scagnetti said, and hung up.
He hung up, scrubbed his face with one dry palm, and picked up the receiver again. The first hospital he called was Trinity, the hospital that had saved his life in return for three miserable weeks of it. There would be a bitter, poetic justice in it if she were there. They would be a matching set, Jack and his broken Jill, put together again by the same doctor. The idea made so much sense that he was stunned when the admissions nurse informed him that she was not there, so much so that he insisted that she check the list of recent admissions for Jane Does matching her description. But there were no blonde china dolls with broken wings and exposed hearts, and he hung up without saying thank you or goodbye.
Kings County, Coney Island Hospital, Jacobi, Queens, Bellevue. He dialed them all one by one, fingers growing more unsteady with every negative answer. He should be relieved; most people would be to know that their world was not lying shattered and bleeding on some trauma gurney while a surgeon sewed them back together with catgut and twelve years of training. But he knew better. In a hospital, at least someone was taking care of them. He knew all too well what could happen when no one was looking. He had cleaned it up too many times to count and delivered the sorry remains of the aftermath to the Nerd Squad.
His hands were shaking so badly by the time he dialed Woodhull Medical Center that he had to dial twice. The mechanical, disinterested voice of an automated system had just picked up and begun to recite a laundry list of departments and extensions when he heard the unmistakable scrape of a key in the lock of the front door.
"Shit." Muffled and irritated. Then the key slid home, and the door swung inward to reveal Rebecca, bundled against the cold and carrying a white, paper bag on her lap.
"Where the hell have you been?" he demanded. Too loud, too full of worry and adrenaline. The automated voice in his ear paused in its litany of grand high poobahs of medical miracle to tell him that that was not a recognized extension, please repeat the command. He slammed the receiver into its cradle hard enough to elicit a fearful bleep from the phone and stalked to the door, where Rebecca blinked at him in comical surprise.
She held up the paper bag. "Bagels," she announced uncertainly. "I thought you might want breakfast. I forgot that even the cradle of Scrooge celebrates Christmas." She pulled off her knit cap and shook snow from the ends of her hair.
His mouth worked. She was lovely with the dusting of snow in her hair and roses in her cheeks. "Bagels?" he repeated. "Do you have any fuckin' idea- I've got half the PD lookin' for you."
She froze in the act of peeling off her gloves. "PD? Love, it was just-,"
"Since three in the fuckin' mornin?" he shouted. "Don't tell me it was just a bagel run, Rebecca, 'cause I'm not fuckin' stupid, just a hunk of fuckin' dick for you to play with."
"I never said you were," she shot back, and slapped her gloves onto her lap. "Ever."
"Yeah? Well, right now, you're actin' like it."
She let out a deep breath. "Because I brought you bagels?"
He fought the urge to swat the crumpled sack from her lap. "Fuck the bagels," he snapped. "This is about you bein' gone from my bed since three in the goddamn mornin'."
"Your bed?" she countered softly, and slipped her coat off her shoulders.
"Our bed," he corrected gently, and reached to help her with her coat. It was unthinking impulse. "Our bed. But I ain't gonna stand here and play Pick That Adjective with you."
"So don't." She kissed his palm and nudged past him into the living room. "I got plain, sesame seed, cinnamon raisin, blueberry, and pumpernickel."
"I don't give a damn about the bagels. Where the hell were you?"
She turned to face him. "Obviously not where you think I was," she answered mildly.
"Oh, yeah? And where might that be?"
She approached him until her footplates scraped his bare shins, set her brakes, and opened her legrests. "With another man." She reached out and flattened her palm against his bare belly, splayed fingers spidering over his scar. She leaned forward and planted butterfly kisses in the cup of his navel.
"That's not going to work," he said, but he made no move to retreat from the contact. There had been too many nights of sleeping in the same bed miles apart. His hand dropped to cup the back of her head.
She laughed, and it vibrated over his skin in a warm rush of air. "I'm not, you know," she murmured. "With another man. There's never going to be anybody else." Muffled and vague with contentment. "Frankly, I'm surprised you noticed I was gone."
Irritation prickled his skin like nettles. "I ain't a dumbass." Then, more softly, "I always notice when you're gone."
She looked up at him, and her expression twisted his heart. It was mournful and adoring and tinged with inexplicable sorrow and longing. "Oh, love," she murmured, and wobbled to her feet with a startlingly serpentine undulation of her spine. She balanced herself with her hands on his shoulders and rested her head on his chest.
He wrapped his arms around her to support her. "Where you been goin', huh, doll?" he asked. "What's got you sneakin' out in the middle of the night if not some other guy?"
"A ghost. Or a spot of underdone potato if you prefer." She scratched his back in slow, lazy circles."
"What?" Befuddled and a trifle impatient.
"Nothing. It was a riff on A Christmas Carol." She mouthed the bony plate of his sternum, and her breath tickled the coarse hair there.
"Very nice; I know you're a genius, Rebecca. I don't need proof of your hundred-grand education. I need an answer as to where the fuck you've been for the last four hours."
"But it does answer your question-sort of," she countered defensively. "Just not directly."
"You know what gets me hard? A straight answer."
"Oh, I know all kinds of things that get you hard," she murmured wickedly. "But point taken." She planted a kiss on his sternum and made to sit.
He eased her into her chair, and she turned and rolled into the kitchen with the bag of bagels on her lap.
"I went to talk to someone," she said at length, and plugged in the coffeepot. "An old teacher. I needed advice."
"This teacher got a name?" He followed her into the kitchen and sat down at the table.
"He does. You wouldn't know it." She opened the bag of bagels, took out a blueberry one, and set it on a paper towel.
"Enlighten me," he pressed.
She sighed and took a butter knife from the silverware drawer. "Professor Snape. You won't find him in any of your high-tech databases, so I wouldn't waste the time." She cut the bagel in half with laborious, choppy strokes. "He was my chemistry teacher while I studied abroad."
"You mean durin' those three years you don't talk about?"
"Yes. Bagel?"
"Sesame seed."
She rummaged in the bag, retrieved a sesame-seed bagel, and began to saw at it.
"So why this Snape guy? He a mentor of yours?"
She laughed, sultry and bitter, pebbles rolling down a quarry hill, and he swallowed a flicker of unease. She was suddenly hard underneath the skin, marble under crepe, and he thought that if she looked at him now, her gaze would be ancient and reptilian, a crocodile surveying a struggling wildebeest from the baking sanctuary of its mud flat.
"Yes," she said. "Oh, yes."
All teeth and tongue now, muttered Gavin inside his head. Sure as shit. Bloodless and hard as iron and ready to tear the throat out of anything that moves. You didn't even know she had an expression like that until you woke up in the hospital and watched her strap it on with the nurses and Dr. Singh. Then she wore it all the time, a battle mask that never left her face 'cept when she looked at you. She caught the good doctor flat-footed more than once, and you, too. But you were too stoned to do anything but be grateful she was on your side. She strapped it on with the trainee nurse who hurt you while changin' your dressin's, and that girl left the room in tears and never came back. It's the face she wears when the gloves come off and the rules of civilized war don't apply. You don't like it much, and seeing it makes your balls retreat into your belly and your mouth go sour.
She looked at Lessing that way, too, on the day he was remanded to his suite at the rubber-room Hilton. You sat beside her in the gallery and watched her track Lessing, a mongoose watching the hypnotic sway of a cobra. The only movement came from her eyes as they tracked his movement in the courtroom. Her only reaction when he rose and read his prepared statement of gratitude into the official record was a twitch of her upper lip that bared her teeth. It was a stark, gut-level act that raised the hackles on the nape of your neck, and for one crazy moment as the bailiffs were leadin' him away, you thought she was gonna drop from her chair and run him down on all fours. But she didn't. She just let you lead her outta the courtroom, and she burst into tears on the courthouse ramp. Her tear-stained face was on page A-3 of the Times the next mornin' with a caption 'bout victims reactin' to the sentence. You threw out every copy you found because her anguish cramped your gut.
'It's not fair.' That's what she said over and over again on the bench outside the courthouse while tears ran down her face. You thought she was talkin' 'bout the sentence, the lifetime of state-paid care in exchange for six lives and your gut, but later you started to wonder. 'Specially on the days the rehab made your guts cramp and weep and the summer nights when the thunder rumbled and lightnin' cracked the sky and she lay on her side the bed with eyes wide open and didn't sleep. You turned that mornin' over in your head and asked yourself if she hadn't been talkin' 'bout somethin' else entirely. Somethin' like the chance to tear across that courtroom and fasten her teeth onto Lessing's throat. On nights like that, you'd pillow your head on your arm and watch the bony curve of her back for signs that it was changin', stretchin' and crackin' and becoming the framework for somethin' without a whole lotta give a damn in its eyes.
He watched Rebecca and waited for her to catch his eye. Part of him prayed that she wouldn't because he didn't want to see that terrible, shuttered blankness. But she did, and when their eyes met, his heart slowed because it was just her, tired and a little lost, but his girl nonetheless.
"I thought to follow in his footsteps for a time," she went on as she set the sliced bagels on the paper towel and rolled towards the refrigerator. "I idolized him."
"Chemistry teacher? Can't say I see it, doll."
She opened the refrigerator and searched the door for butter, strawberry jam, and honey. "Neither could he. As he put it, I was 'a rolling menace to civilized society, and should I attempt the fine art of chemistry, the resultant disaster would make the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem the aftereffects of bad curry.' If I wanted to blow myself up in the pursuit of the ridiculous and unattainable, I was welcome to do so, but not under his auspices, and not to the detriment of his profession. Cream cheese?"
He nodded. "Sounds like a charmer, this guy."
A snort from within the refrigerator, and then Rebecca backed away and closed the door. "The Professor was one of the most vicious, petty, gleefully savage pricks ever to walk the earth," she announced. It did not sound like condemnation.
"But," he prodded, mystified.
"But he was never a liar," she finished simply. "He was right; had I tried to pursue a career in chemistry, I would have hurt myself or someone else very badly. Probably look like Frankenstein by now."
She brought the bagels and assorted condiments to the table and then went back for his coffee. She set it in front of him and rolled into the space set aside for her.
"None for you?" he asked.
She shook her head and reached for the cream cheese. "You know tea is my drug of choice."
"Well, have a sip of this, and I'll make you some." He held his coffee cup to her lips and steadied it while she took a dainty sip.
He rose from the table and padded to the cupboard where she kept her tea. He brewed it in silence and carried to the table. She picked it up in both hands and took a careful sip.
"You're getting better," she mused. She set the cup on the table and pressed a lingering kiss to his temple.
Somethin's different about her, he thought as he turned into the kiss. For the first time in forever, she's not wired and thrummin' with nervous energy, ready to snap or shatter at the slightest provocation. She's my girl, like she used to be, when I could walk into the room where she was and just let it all go. The dirt, the job, the dead bodies and the victims still breathin'. I could shut the door and kiss her, and alla that faded into the background until I was ready to pick it up again.
He drew his lips down the slope of her nose and nuzzled her upper lip. He was tempted to kiss her, forget this conversation and carry her to bed, but he sat back and reached for his coffee instead. The easy way out was no longer an option. Not if he wanted her to stay this way.
"So you went to see this guy at three in the mornin'," he said.
She traced her finger around the rim of her mug. "Not the best timing," she agreed. "Not that he had much choice. Besides, I couldn't do this anymore. Not one more day." She sipped her tea and plucked a dried blueberry from her bagel.
"Do what anymore?" His throat was dry and painful.
"This." She gestured at the kitchen and living room. "I couldn't go another day pretending everything was getting better. It's still fucked up, still blown to hell, and nothing I was doing was making a difference."
He stared at her in disbelief. "But things are getting better, doll," he insisted. "I'm not hurtin' anymore, and I'm back on the job. I mean, I know I wasn't the best husband for a while there, but-,"
She smiled and covered his hand with hers. "You are doing fine, babe. You did the best you could under the circumstances, and I'm the luckiest woman in the world. It's me that's not getting any better. You're at the top of the hill, and I'm still trying to get out of the starting gate."
He drew the ball of his thumb over her knuckles and waited. She would tell him, or she wouldn't.
She shrugged. "Maybe it's because you had a goal. Getting back to the job."
"And you," he added quietly. "Always you."
She took a ragged breath, and he thought he saw the shimmer of unshed tears in her eyes, but her voice was steady when she spoke. "All I had, all I could do was sit and hold your hand and pray that you'd come through. I don't think I've ever felt so useless in my life. The doctors and nurses and Mac were all taking care of you-,"
"Mac didn't take care of shit, Rebecca," he said firmly. "He got me to the hospital, but the rest was all you. Did me wonders to wake up and see you sittin' there. You were beautiful."
"And you were stoned," she said fondly. Then she grew serious again. "What happened to you and the rehab after were your road, but the eight days between were mine, and I…lost it. I'd always understood I could lose you to the badge, but understanding and knowing are worlds apart, and I just…couldn't handle it. I just got so fucking pissed."
"At me."
She looked at him as though he'd proclaimed himself Ghandi. "You were the only person in the universe I wasn't pissed at. I was pissed at Lessing for the bomb, at your job for putting you in that building that morning, at the asshole with the Ipod. At your friends for being fine when you weren't. At myself for not being able to wave a magic wand and make it all go away. Hell, I was mad at the nurses for laughing when the world had so obviously come unglued."
"And my mother?"
"What about her?" Wary surprise.
"I know what she asked of you. I know about the papers."
Her eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed. "Hawkes," she said shrewdly.
"No, my father."
She uttered a short, ugly bark of laughter. "I'll be damned." She took an indelicate gulp of tea. "Narced by the elder."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Tell you what? That your mother wanted to harvest your semen and sell her grandchildren to the most acceptable applicant? God. You were in critical condition in the ICU with your guts held together by surgical stitching. I wasn't about to dump that in your lap, wasn't about to make you choose."
She thought she'd lose. She thought that if push came to shove, you'd choose blood over weddin' lace. That's why she kept her mouth shut.
The epiphany made his chest hurt. "You didn't tell me 'cause you thought you'd lose, didn't you?" It was a whisper.
She didn't look at him, and that was answer enough. He seized the armrest of her chair and jerked it until they were face to face, nose to nose and footplate to shin. He cupped her face in his hands. "You will never lose, do you understand?" Low, a whisper in the dark. "Rebecca Olivia Stanhope Flack, look at me. Do. You. Understand?"
"I-,"
"My mother had no right to do that to you. She was a bitch, and she's never gonna behave that way again. Not to you." He traced her cheekbones, fragile as china beneath his hands. Her eyes were wide and bewildered. She wanted to believe him, but she didn't quite dare; her vicious instinct for self-preservation would not allow it.
"But she's your mother." Plaintive.
"And I love her. But you're my wife, my girl, and when I married you, I gave you everythin'. It wasn't just a fuck-a piece of paper and a name change, doll. You won it all. The only babies I'm ever gonna make in this lifetime are gonna come from you, and if she doesn't like that, then that's too damn bad."
She curled her cool hands around his wrists and sat with her forehead pressed lightly to his. He could hear her swallowing against a hot, tight knot of emotions in her throat, and he dropped a comforting kiss on the crown of her head. When her labored breathing had eased, he lifted her chin so that their eyes met.
"Drink the rest of your tea before it gets cold," he said, and sat back. He handed her the half-full mug. "So, you see this Snape guy at three o'clock in the mornin' 'cause you needed advice. What'd you ask him?"
"I thought that when Lessing was sentenced, it would go away." She lifted her mug to her lips, and her hand trembled.
"What would?"
"The anger, the nightmares, the feeling of wanting to wet my pants and curl into a little ball every time you holstered up and went on shift. But it didn't. The anger only got worse. Hell, at the sentencing hearing, I wanted to rip his throat out and leave it bleeding on the courthouse floor. Sometimes, I feel like I'm choking on it. I'm afraid to touch you because I don't want to get it on you."
He thought of the sentencing hearing and that feral, furious curl of lip, and of last night, when she had burst into tears on her way down to glory. It had scared the shit out of him, the sudden reversal of fortune, and knowing the reason behind it made him no less uneasy.
And guilty, of course. The guilt was worst of all. He had tried his damndest not to hurt her with the sharp edges of his shield, not to crush her with the weight of his oath. He had separated her from it as best he could by leaving the worst of the job at the precinct doors and bringing home only the rare funny story of mistaken identity or bumbling crook. He had made sure to shower three times in the precinct shower with Irish Spring soap before he went home to her, to leave the grit of the streets and the filth of murderers in the drain trap of the stationhouse shower where they belonged. He had gone through bars of soap faster than the water poured from the showerhead, and in the end, it hadn't been enough. She'd still been blighted by the gleam of his badge. The proof was right in front of him.
He searched his memories in an attempt to pinpoint the moment of contamination. Maybe it had happened while he was sleeping, transferred by the brush of her hand over his bare back, or maybe it had been passed in a good-morning kiss before Crest and Listerine could sterilized his sleep-gummy mouth. Maybe it had happened while she was sucking him off with feverish abandon in the middle of the living room; maybe it was too deep in him to come out. Or maybe it had happened while she was cleaning his guts out of the crevices of his badge.
Or maybe it happened on the day Lessing laid your guts wide open and delivered her to a hospital waitin' room, his father grunted, and he saw him in his mind's eye, pouring Beam into a coffee cup and pushing the contents across the table. Maybe for all their scrubbin' and sterilizin', they missed a speck of dust from the buildin' and stirred it into the air like a blown kiss. Maybe it drifted on the stale currents of the buildin' and landed on her arm while she slumped in her chair and prayed to ten gods and thirteen demons that you wouldn't leave the hospital toes-up, or maybe you passed it to her on that first kiss after you returned to the land of the livin'. However she came by it, it's all your fault, and the damage has been done. Consider it a lawman's legacy.
"I couldn't go the rest of my life being afraid to love you, so I went to him because he doesn't lie."
"What did you ask him?"
"How to live with it. The hate. The fear like sugared pennies in my mouth."
"What did he say?"
"To live with the truth or die."
"That's it? It's that simple?"
She nodded. "That simple. He doesn't lie."
"So, what're you gonna do?" He swallowed a mouthful of lukewarm coffee to moisten his throat.
She smiled at him, an impish, radiant smile that warmed her eyes and made her lovely and impossibly young. "I'm going to live, babe. It's the only choice there is."
He blinked at her, suddenly giddy. "Just like that?"
Her smile widened. "Just like that." She picked up her tea and drained it.
He wanted to believe her, but there had been too many false starts, too many returns to midnight. It wasn't until three days later, when she laughed as he entwined their bodies after a shower, that he accepted the gift from an anonymous donor. It was bright, brilliant, living laughter, not a remembered echo of happier days. She was still broken, still fragile, and there was still work to be done, but this time when he reached for a piece of her that had fallen away, it was to create something new, something beautiful untarnished by yesterday's sorrow. As he arched his back and dipped his head to kiss her laughing lips, he spared a thought for Professor Snape, the chemistry professor who could not tell a lie. He thanked him for a miracle smooth and warm beneath his hands, and promised himself that if they ever met, he'd buy the man a pint in gratitude for each of his tomorrows.