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Title: A Is For Aiden: The Road Not Taken
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
laguera25
Fandom: CSI:NY
Pairing: Implied Danny/Lindsay; gen
Word Count: 1,921
Spoilers: Spoilers for 509, "The Box". Major, major SPOILERS. If you don't want to be spoiled, do not read beyond this point.
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: I decided that I wanted to write alphabet fic, one fic for each letter of the alphabet. Call it the world's longest acrostic. I also wanted to write a fic a day until Christmas. We'll see how that goes; odds are good that I will fall behind or be overwhelmed. Each fic will feature a character or theme from CSI:NY. Each story will be self-contained and can be read separately from the others.
A is for Aiden. He thinks of her often, though never when he expects it. He'd thought, after she died, that he would know the days when she would haunt him most, the hours. The first anniversary of her murder, he'd braced himself, held his breath in anticipation, sure that he would see her everywhere. He'd taken his glasses off on the subway ride to the crime lab and tucked his chin into his windbreaker, tried to hide among the jostling, swaying bodies and the musty, dusty tang of bodies and grainy, grey newsprint. He'd thought that if he were blind, he wouldn't be able to see her peering at him from windows and from shadowy corners.
He needn't have worried, as it turned out. He hadn't seen her that day. Not in the lab, flitting through the dim, sepulchral corridors in her white lab coat turned shroud, stark white against the dull, grey concrete. Not even at Sullivan's after shift, where he and Flack had gone to chase away the ghosts of the job with pints of beer and Guinness. No Aiden in the old-world gloom of oak and mahogany, no dark hair and white teeth and throaty laugh. No whisper against the sensitive shell of his ear just before the clack and chatter of pool balls drowned out the world.
I'm outta your league, Messer. No laughter like smoke and rye to dance along his spine and hint at roads not taken. He's thought about that laugh since then, turned it over in his mind from the safety of a barstool or the steam-fogged sanctuary of the shower, and God knows he regrets those roads that now can never be traveled.
She hadn't turned up when she was expected, a prim and proper Victorian ghost, and looking back, he wonders why he'd ever thought she would. Aiden had been a free spirit in life, a woman who'd respected her oaths and honored them, but who'd never been afraid to tell the world to kiss her Brooklyn ass. Aiden would come, if she came, when she was damn good and ready, and not a minute before. Nobody was going to rush her. Not even Messer. She was dead, and the dead were beholden to no one; the dead had little use for the schedule of the living. They had nothing but time.
She comes, of course. She always comes. Just never when he expects. She comes while he's singing in the shower, head full of shampoo and throat full of Soundgarden or Rush. She rustles the clear, plastic shower curtain, curls her fingers around its warped, slick edge and tells him he sounds like a cat being neutered with a pair of rusty pliers. She laughs when she says it, and promises not to tell Flack about his secret stash of Tesh CDs under the bed. She's gone by the time he steps out of the shower, but sometimes he thinks he sees the outline of her hand in the steam and condensation on the limp curtain. Just for a minute, and then it's gone, too, and he's just some asshole standing naked in his bathroom and blinking at a cheap shower curtain.
She comes to scenes sometimes, hovers just beyond the flapping yellow tape or crouches beside him while he documents trace or collects tissue samples. She never speaks, just watches, eyes thoughtful inside her face as he tweezes microscopic bits of someone's husband or daughter from the sidewalk or plucks it from the thick pile carpeting of a Manhattan penthouse. Sometimes her lips purse, and he knows she's spotted something important, but when he raises his eyebrows in inquiry and entreaty, she simply shakes her head.
Sorry, Messer. You're on your own. He could strangle her when she does that, but then he remembers that the last time he saw her neck, it had been so much charred bone in Stella's gloved hands. Then he wishes he could take the thought back. He drops his gaze before she can see the shame there, and when he looks up again, she's gone.
She comes whenever he has chicken parmesan, slips into his mouth on the steam and oils the taste of cheese and sauce and chicken with memories of her. Of sitting in her apartment with a plate of parm in front of him and listening to her rant about bureaucracy and dirtbag lawyers. Of sitting there with his elbows on the table and watching her work her magic with her grandmother's recipe. Of sitting on the couch or the front stoop of her building with a bottle of beer and trading war stories about jobs and brothers. No matter where he goes, the chicken parmesan is never as good as when she made it, and sometimes he wishes he could stop eating it because each mouthful only makes him angry and fills his belly with a dull heaviness, a sadness that won't leave him when the food does a few hours later. But he doesn't stop, because he's convinced that if he ever tastes a parm as good as hers, he'll be able to raise her from the dead, brush the soot and ash from her hair and remember what it's like to feel the sun on his face. If that's too much to ask, at least he can bury her once and for all, a little more with every bite until only peace remains.
Lindsay tried to make parm once. He prefers not to think about it.
Aiden hasn't come since Lindsay moved into his life and brought Montana with her. He doesn't know why. Maybe the wide-open spaces of Bozeman had left too little space for her in his cramped apartment. Maybe she'd gotten tired of being crammed into the closet, a relic from a past he'd rather forget. Or maybe she thought he didn't need her anymore, that dry, dusty Montana kisses were medicine enough for what ailed him.
Oh, but they aren't. Not anymore. If he's honest, they never were, but his hindsight has always far exceeded his foresight, and let's face it, pleasure and pain are one and the same at the hard, ugly bottom. It's a matter of perspective. Even a cut feels good in the instant before the insulted nerves sound the alarm and bring the pain down like a hammer, warm and liquid and burning with undeniable life. It had even felt good when the Irish mobster had shattered his hand with the butt of his gun and ground the broken bones. A moment, just a moment, white-hot and all-consuming, but for that moment, he'd been alive in every nerve ending from scalp to sole, clinging to life with every fiber and indifferent to the countless sins he carried. They'd been obliterated by the will to live. Then the perverse pleasure had passed, and the ordinary agony of survival had set in like a cramp and made him weep with frustration. Pleasure is epiphany. Pain is the dirty work of healing.
Lindsay's medicine is bitter going down, hot and sour and laced with poison. Her kisses cut and bruise and sting, but there comes no healing ache behind them, no tickling stitch of renewal. She forgives only to acquire an impossible debt, and even if he works a thousand lifetimes, it will never be paid. Her kisses take and leave nothing behind but shame and regret and a yawning emptiness that makes him feel light-headed.
He wishes Aiden were here, because he knows now what Lindsay has done with her kisses, what she's done with everything he's missing. She's taken it into herself and built a human tether, a tiny, helpless anchor with fingers and toes and a sparrow's heartbeat. He's got the proof tucked into the pocket of his jacket, protected from the wind. Even now, he wants to protect it, to ensure that he does it no harm, does better by it than he did by Reuben Sandoval, who's never going to ride a bike again. Maybe if he'd lived, he would've ridden a bike like this someday, three hundred horses and chrome to the end of the world. Now he's not riding anything but a pine box, and somewhere out there, a woman who's too good for him by half wishes him well instead of spitting on his future grave. It's more than he deserves.
Maybe the shadow in his pocket is simply a balancing of the scales. A curse for a blessing. Or maybe it's a blessing he just can't see yet because it's too far ahead of him. There's no way for him to know.
Aiden would know. Aiden knew everything that mattered. Aiden knew when he was full of shit and when he was scared and when to just let him be. Aiden would know what to do now, but he's lost sight of her, and no matter where he looks, she never comes into focus. He hasn't even heard her voice in months, and he's beginning to think she's finally gone, driven out by choking Montana dust. If so, he's got no one to blame but himself.
Of all the things he's lost over the years, left behind in a mad dash to the next big thing or impossible dream, he'd never thought to lose her, never wanted to. But the spaces she once occupied have vanished, buried beneath Montana dirt and dead children and phantoms from the future captured on a cheap sonogram.
The thought hurts, makes him want to lean over the side of his bike and retch, heave guilt and leave it on the asphalt like an oil slick, but instead, he straightens and leans on the throttle. The road unspools in front of him. He can't outrun the truth in his pocket. It's too late and too cheap, and he'd be a sorry bastard if he tried, but maybe he can outrun the rest of it, for a while, anyway.
And maybe if he runs hard enough, he'll run right into Aiden, sitting on the stoop of her building with a beer in one hand and a smile on her face.
C'mon, Danny, she'll say, and shake her head. You look like shit. When was the last time you ate? Get your ass in here. You won't be of use to anybody if you go collapsin' at a crime scene. Mac'd have your ass.
She'd finish the beer in three long swallows, and jerk her head towards the door. Inside before you fall down. I got a chicken parm in the oven.
She'll stand up and brush the grit from her jeans, and he'll follow her inside because there's no place like home, and Aiden's apartment is the closest thing to home he's ever had. He'll sit in the kitchen with his elbows on the table, and she won't yell at him because she's too busy recreating heaven on earth. He'll watch her cook, and maybe he'll have a beer, and while he's waiting, he'll study the line of her back and wonder about the road not taken, and when he comes home, belly full of chicken parm and beer, it won't be Lindsay he smells on the pillow.
It's only a dream, and an unattainable one at that, but it's his, and he refuses to let it go, not when he's already left so much behind. He tucks it into his pocket beside the picture, pats it once for safekeeping, and lets the road lead him.
Author:
laguera25Fandom: CSI:NY
Pairing: Implied Danny/Lindsay; gen
Word Count: 1,921
Spoilers: Spoilers for 509, "The Box". Major, major SPOILERS. If you don't want to be spoiled, do not read beyond this point.
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: I decided that I wanted to write alphabet fic, one fic for each letter of the alphabet. Call it the world's longest acrostic. I also wanted to write a fic a day until Christmas. We'll see how that goes; odds are good that I will fall behind or be overwhelmed. Each fic will feature a character or theme from CSI:NY. Each story will be self-contained and can be read separately from the others.
A is for Aiden. He thinks of her often, though never when he expects it. He'd thought, after she died, that he would know the days when she would haunt him most, the hours. The first anniversary of her murder, he'd braced himself, held his breath in anticipation, sure that he would see her everywhere. He'd taken his glasses off on the subway ride to the crime lab and tucked his chin into his windbreaker, tried to hide among the jostling, swaying bodies and the musty, dusty tang of bodies and grainy, grey newsprint. He'd thought that if he were blind, he wouldn't be able to see her peering at him from windows and from shadowy corners.
He needn't have worried, as it turned out. He hadn't seen her that day. Not in the lab, flitting through the dim, sepulchral corridors in her white lab coat turned shroud, stark white against the dull, grey concrete. Not even at Sullivan's after shift, where he and Flack had gone to chase away the ghosts of the job with pints of beer and Guinness. No Aiden in the old-world gloom of oak and mahogany, no dark hair and white teeth and throaty laugh. No whisper against the sensitive shell of his ear just before the clack and chatter of pool balls drowned out the world.
I'm outta your league, Messer. No laughter like smoke and rye to dance along his spine and hint at roads not taken. He's thought about that laugh since then, turned it over in his mind from the safety of a barstool or the steam-fogged sanctuary of the shower, and God knows he regrets those roads that now can never be traveled.
She hadn't turned up when she was expected, a prim and proper Victorian ghost, and looking back, he wonders why he'd ever thought she would. Aiden had been a free spirit in life, a woman who'd respected her oaths and honored them, but who'd never been afraid to tell the world to kiss her Brooklyn ass. Aiden would come, if she came, when she was damn good and ready, and not a minute before. Nobody was going to rush her. Not even Messer. She was dead, and the dead were beholden to no one; the dead had little use for the schedule of the living. They had nothing but time.
She comes, of course. She always comes. Just never when he expects. She comes while he's singing in the shower, head full of shampoo and throat full of Soundgarden or Rush. She rustles the clear, plastic shower curtain, curls her fingers around its warped, slick edge and tells him he sounds like a cat being neutered with a pair of rusty pliers. She laughs when she says it, and promises not to tell Flack about his secret stash of Tesh CDs under the bed. She's gone by the time he steps out of the shower, but sometimes he thinks he sees the outline of her hand in the steam and condensation on the limp curtain. Just for a minute, and then it's gone, too, and he's just some asshole standing naked in his bathroom and blinking at a cheap shower curtain.
She comes to scenes sometimes, hovers just beyond the flapping yellow tape or crouches beside him while he documents trace or collects tissue samples. She never speaks, just watches, eyes thoughtful inside her face as he tweezes microscopic bits of someone's husband or daughter from the sidewalk or plucks it from the thick pile carpeting of a Manhattan penthouse. Sometimes her lips purse, and he knows she's spotted something important, but when he raises his eyebrows in inquiry and entreaty, she simply shakes her head.
Sorry, Messer. You're on your own. He could strangle her when she does that, but then he remembers that the last time he saw her neck, it had been so much charred bone in Stella's gloved hands. Then he wishes he could take the thought back. He drops his gaze before she can see the shame there, and when he looks up again, she's gone.
She comes whenever he has chicken parmesan, slips into his mouth on the steam and oils the taste of cheese and sauce and chicken with memories of her. Of sitting in her apartment with a plate of parm in front of him and listening to her rant about bureaucracy and dirtbag lawyers. Of sitting there with his elbows on the table and watching her work her magic with her grandmother's recipe. Of sitting on the couch or the front stoop of her building with a bottle of beer and trading war stories about jobs and brothers. No matter where he goes, the chicken parmesan is never as good as when she made it, and sometimes he wishes he could stop eating it because each mouthful only makes him angry and fills his belly with a dull heaviness, a sadness that won't leave him when the food does a few hours later. But he doesn't stop, because he's convinced that if he ever tastes a parm as good as hers, he'll be able to raise her from the dead, brush the soot and ash from her hair and remember what it's like to feel the sun on his face. If that's too much to ask, at least he can bury her once and for all, a little more with every bite until only peace remains.
Lindsay tried to make parm once. He prefers not to think about it.
Aiden hasn't come since Lindsay moved into his life and brought Montana with her. He doesn't know why. Maybe the wide-open spaces of Bozeman had left too little space for her in his cramped apartment. Maybe she'd gotten tired of being crammed into the closet, a relic from a past he'd rather forget. Or maybe she thought he didn't need her anymore, that dry, dusty Montana kisses were medicine enough for what ailed him.
Oh, but they aren't. Not anymore. If he's honest, they never were, but his hindsight has always far exceeded his foresight, and let's face it, pleasure and pain are one and the same at the hard, ugly bottom. It's a matter of perspective. Even a cut feels good in the instant before the insulted nerves sound the alarm and bring the pain down like a hammer, warm and liquid and burning with undeniable life. It had even felt good when the Irish mobster had shattered his hand with the butt of his gun and ground the broken bones. A moment, just a moment, white-hot and all-consuming, but for that moment, he'd been alive in every nerve ending from scalp to sole, clinging to life with every fiber and indifferent to the countless sins he carried. They'd been obliterated by the will to live. Then the perverse pleasure had passed, and the ordinary agony of survival had set in like a cramp and made him weep with frustration. Pleasure is epiphany. Pain is the dirty work of healing.
Lindsay's medicine is bitter going down, hot and sour and laced with poison. Her kisses cut and bruise and sting, but there comes no healing ache behind them, no tickling stitch of renewal. She forgives only to acquire an impossible debt, and even if he works a thousand lifetimes, it will never be paid. Her kisses take and leave nothing behind but shame and regret and a yawning emptiness that makes him feel light-headed.
He wishes Aiden were here, because he knows now what Lindsay has done with her kisses, what she's done with everything he's missing. She's taken it into herself and built a human tether, a tiny, helpless anchor with fingers and toes and a sparrow's heartbeat. He's got the proof tucked into the pocket of his jacket, protected from the wind. Even now, he wants to protect it, to ensure that he does it no harm, does better by it than he did by Reuben Sandoval, who's never going to ride a bike again. Maybe if he'd lived, he would've ridden a bike like this someday, three hundred horses and chrome to the end of the world. Now he's not riding anything but a pine box, and somewhere out there, a woman who's too good for him by half wishes him well instead of spitting on his future grave. It's more than he deserves.
Maybe the shadow in his pocket is simply a balancing of the scales. A curse for a blessing. Or maybe it's a blessing he just can't see yet because it's too far ahead of him. There's no way for him to know.
Aiden would know. Aiden knew everything that mattered. Aiden knew when he was full of shit and when he was scared and when to just let him be. Aiden would know what to do now, but he's lost sight of her, and no matter where he looks, she never comes into focus. He hasn't even heard her voice in months, and he's beginning to think she's finally gone, driven out by choking Montana dust. If so, he's got no one to blame but himself.
Of all the things he's lost over the years, left behind in a mad dash to the next big thing or impossible dream, he'd never thought to lose her, never wanted to. But the spaces she once occupied have vanished, buried beneath Montana dirt and dead children and phantoms from the future captured on a cheap sonogram.
The thought hurts, makes him want to lean over the side of his bike and retch, heave guilt and leave it on the asphalt like an oil slick, but instead, he straightens and leans on the throttle. The road unspools in front of him. He can't outrun the truth in his pocket. It's too late and too cheap, and he'd be a sorry bastard if he tried, but maybe he can outrun the rest of it, for a while, anyway.
And maybe if he runs hard enough, he'll run right into Aiden, sitting on the stoop of her building with a beer in one hand and a smile on her face.
C'mon, Danny, she'll say, and shake her head. You look like shit. When was the last time you ate? Get your ass in here. You won't be of use to anybody if you go collapsin' at a crime scene. Mac'd have your ass.
She'd finish the beer in three long swallows, and jerk her head towards the door. Inside before you fall down. I got a chicken parm in the oven.
She'll stand up and brush the grit from her jeans, and he'll follow her inside because there's no place like home, and Aiden's apartment is the closest thing to home he's ever had. He'll sit in the kitchen with his elbows on the table, and she won't yell at him because she's too busy recreating heaven on earth. He'll watch her cook, and maybe he'll have a beer, and while he's waiting, he'll study the line of her back and wonder about the road not taken, and when he comes home, belly full of chicken parm and beer, it won't be Lindsay he smells on the pillow.
It's only a dream, and an unattainable one at that, but it's his, and he refuses to let it go, not when he's already left so much behind. He tucks it into his pocket beside the picture, pats it once for safekeeping, and lets the road lead him.
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